Trump is deporting more immigrants — but the data is incomplete

One of President Donald Trump's chief priorities — to conduct the "largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America" — is well underway. According to both media reports and official data, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been increasing the number of arrests of people allegedly in the country illegally. But a lot of that data is incomplete — and what we do know also suggests that Trump isn't sticking literally to his campaign promises, either when it comes to prioritizing immigrants who have committed violent crimes or reaching the numbers promised.

According to data ICE posted on X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, the agency arrested 8,276 people between Jan. 22 and Jan. 31. It also issued 6,577 "detainers lodged" for people arrested by other law-enforcement agencies whom ICE has reason to believe are eligible for deportation. That's an average of 828 arrests and 658 detainers lodged per day — 980 arrests and 762 detainers lodged per day since Jan. 25, when ICE really started beefing up enforcement with widely reported raids in Chicago and other cities.

That's a big increase from the last year of published statistics under former President Joe Biden's administration. During fiscal year 2024 (from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30, 2024), ICE reported 113,431 arrests, or an average of 310 per day. So Trump is certainly cracking down on immigration more than his predecessor did.

However, it's not nearly the pace the Trump administration needs to hit if it wants to achieve its stated goal of deporting every undocumented immigrant. The Pew Research Center estimated there were 11.0 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. in 2022. If ICE were to arrest 980 people and lodge 762 detainers per day every day going forward, it would take over 17 years to arrest or lodge a detainer against 11.0 million people.

And that's just based on the data we have. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive, real-time source for ICE data; we only know the numbers for Jan. 22-31 because the agency posted them on social media, and it has not posted any data so far in February. (538 contacted ICE to ask for the missing data, but the agency did not respond by press time.)

Furthermore, ICE hasn't posted any public data about how many of the people it has arrested this year have been accused of crimes, violent or otherwise. However, NBC News obtained that data for Jan. 26 and found that only 613 of the 1,179 arrests that day, or 52 percent, were considered "criminal arrests"; the remaining 48 percent either had not done anything wrong other than being in the U.S. illegally or had committed nonviolent offenses. By contrast, in fiscal year 2024, 51 percent of the people ICE arrested had been convicted of a crime, and an additional 21 percent had criminal charges pending against them.

538 also asked ICE for data on the criminality of the people who have been arrested under Trump but did not hear back. Without this data, it's impossible to know whether the Trump administration is prioritizing deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, as it has claimed.