US immigration data becomes harder to find
Washington: The Trump administration likes to promote its immigration enforcement agenda through numbers, with ambitious goals to deport 1 million people, report zero releases at the US-Mexico border and arrest thousands of alleged gang members.
For all the boasting, the administration has been releasing less reliable, carefully vetted data than its predecessors on a signature policy that has become one of the most contentious of Trump’s second term.
The gap in information and a loss of figures from an office that has tracked immigration data back to the 1800s have left researchers, advocates, lawyers and journalists without important statistics to hold the Republican administration to account.
“They aren’t publishing the data,” said Mike Howell, who heads the conservative Oversight Project, an advocacy group pushing for more deportations. Instead, Howell said, the Department of Homeland Security has put out numbers in news releases “that purport to be statistics with no statistical backup, and the numbers have jumped all over the place.”
With mass deportations a priority, new restrictions and increased enforcement have led to a surge in immigration arrests, detentions and deportations.
But finding the metrics that once measured those changes can be hard. It is an extension of earlier administration moves to limit the flow of government information by scrubbing or removing federal datasets or by the firing last year of the top official overseeing jobs data.
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics is responsible for publishing figures from Homeland Security agencies, including removals and the nationalities of those deported, to provide a comprehensive picture of immigration trends at the border and inside the United States.
Originally known as the Office of Immigration Statistics, it has tracked such data since 1872. In its current form, created under the Biden administration, it also started publishing monthly reports that allowed researchers to track developments almost in real time.
But key enforcement metrics on its website have not been updated since early last year. A note on the page where the monthly reports were says it “is delayed while it is under review.”
“It’s the most timely data. It’s the most reliable data,” Austin Kocher, research professor at Syracuse University who closely follows immigration data trends, said about the monthly reports. “It has the most omniscient view of immigration enforcement across the entire agency.”
An interactive dashboard launched by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2023 once let users examine whom the agency was arresting, their nationalities, criminal histories and removal numbers. ICE called it a “new era in transparency.”
Though intended for quarterly updates, the latest data is from January 2025. The agency’s annual report, typically released in December, had not been published as of mid-March.
Other agencies also publish data that touches on immigration, and parts of it do continue to roll out, such as US Customs and Border Protection statistics detailing border encounters or data from the
Department of Justice’s immigration courts.
