190,000 Convicted Criminals Removed. Here’s the Number the Media Is Burying.

Nearly one million. That is how many deportations the Department of Homeland Security carried out in the first 18 months of President Donald Trump’s second term, according to a new analysis from the Migration Policy Institute that Reuters reported on October 22. The exact figure is 980,000, and the trend line inside it is what has people talking.

The report covers January 2025 through July 2026. It was written by Marc Rosenblum, a former head of the DHS Office of Homeland Security Statistics, which gives the numbers more weight than a typical tally.

The total breaks into three categories. About 580,000, or 59 percent, were formal removals. Another 300,000, or 30 percent, were enforcement returns, and 110,000, or 11 percent, were administrative returns. Together they make up the 980,000 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection completed.

The pace is accelerating. Deportations of people arrested inside the country averaged about 8,000 a month in the administration’s first three months. Between May and July of 2026, that rose to roughly 19,000 a month, more than doubling the early rate.

Stretch that new interior pace across a full year and it comes to about 228,000 deportations from inside the country alone, and that does not count removals at the border. The machine is clearly gaining speed.

Border enforcement is a big reason the numbers look different from past years. Illegal crossings have fallen to a few thousand a month, down from peaks that topped 200,000 a month under the previous administration. Fewer people are arriving, which is exactly what voters were promised.

The administration’s own tallies run higher than the think tank’s. DHS reported more than 675,000 deportations in the first year, and told Newsweek that nearly 1.1 million people had been deported as of September 7, with more than 1.1 million arrested. Officials also say more than 3 million people in the country illegally have left since January 2025, including an estimated 2.2 million who departed voluntarily.

The gap comes down to counting. The government figures blend formal deportations with voluntary and self-directed departures, while the MPI analysis counts only government-executed removals and returns. Both sets of numbers show a historic enforcement effort, and they simply measure different things.

By the Migration Policy Institute’s math, the 980,000 total works out to roughly 650,000 a year, which is short of the one million a year the president has said he wants. The administration has been open about that goal, and the report shows how much ground remains.

History offers some perspective. The same analysis notes that annual deportations are up from the Biden years and from Trump’s first term, though still below historical peaks. Under Barack Obama, fiscal year 2009 saw about 962,000 deportations, and fiscal year 2000 under Bill Clinton reached 1.86 million when returns are included.

Money is the fuel. Congress provided $45 billion for immigration detention and nearly $30 billion for ICE to hire more agents and expand removals. That funding is why the interior pace keeps climbing.

Arrests tell the same story. In July 2026, ICE made 49,571 arrests, the highest monthly total of the second term to that point. Detention populations have also been reaching historic highs.

Now the number that matters most for public safety. The report found that about 20 percent of all the deportations involved people with a criminal conviction, which is roughly 190,000 individuals. That is nearly 190,000 convicted offenders removed from American communities, and every one of them is a case where the system did what Americans expect it to do.

The principle behind the enforcement is simple and old. Entering or remaining in the country illegally is a violation of federal law passed by Congress, and a nation that does not enforce its own immigration code does not really have one. The administration says its deportation drive is meant to improve domestic security.

Equal enforcement is the point. Conservatives have argued for decades that laws on the books should be applied, not selectively ignored, and that respect for the rule of law starts at the border. Every removal carried out under existing statute reinforces that standard for the millions who followed the legal path.

Enforcement is not limited to removals. The State Department said this week that the administration has revoked more than 300,000 visas during the second term, a sign that the effort reaches people who arrived legally and then broke the terms of their stay.

Leadership has shifted along the way. The president replaced Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin as Homeland Security secretary and the department continues to expand its operations.