The Trump administration says it is going after "the worst of the worst." The man who used to run the Department of Homeland Security's own statistics office has now counted who it's actually deporting.
Marc Rosenblum tallied 980,000 deportations in Trump's second term through July 31, 2026 — about 18 months — in an analysis for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, Stateline reported.
Only 20% of them had a criminal conviction. Among people who had lived in the U.S. for at least two years, it was 28%.
"These data here do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst," Rosenblum said.
Who is Marc Rosenblum
Rosenblum isn't an outside critic. He worked at DHS from 2016 and ran its statistics office from 2023 until July 2026, when he resigned in protest over what he called the Trump administration's "war on immigrants." He built this analysis using only public records.
The "criminals" often aren't
Even the 20% with convictions isn't what the administration's speeches suggest. Among those convicted, Rosenblum said, the records were more likely to be immigration or traffic offenses than violent or other serious crimes.
DHS's position is that living in the country illegally is reason enough to be deported.
Where the 980,000 came from
The number also mixes very different things:
- About 300,000 people were arrested inside the United States.
- About 680,000 were turned around at the border or arrested there and sent back.
- About 170,000 of the total agreed to leave "voluntarily" rather than keep fighting their cases.
On top of that, DHS has claimed more than 2.2 million "self-deportations" — a number others dispute. Rosenblum estimated between 310,000 and 1.5 million people who had been here at least a year left on their own — an estimate Stateline notes is imprecise, because it leans on Mexican census data about returning citizens. Those departures include legal immigrants.
We've written about what "leave on your own terms" can mean: one woman the government's $200 million self-deportation campaign persuaded to go was dead five weeks later.
"Wait until you see what we do next year"
The administration isn't slowing down. Speaking at a Hispanic leadership event near Miami on October 1, border czar Tom Homan said, "Mass deportation is happening," and predicted September would be "the highest deportations of any month in the history of ICE."
"Wait until you see what we do next year," he said.
ICE already set an arrest record in July by grabbing people at airports and even at a swimming hole in a national forest.
What the data show
DHS's own former chief statistician counted 980,000 deportations in Trump's second term through July 2026, and only 20% of the people deported had a criminal conviction — often for immigration or traffic offenses. He concluded the data "do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst," and Trump's border czar says next year will be bigger.
