The Department of Homeland Security says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 483,200 people in fiscal year 2026 and made more than 491,000 immigration arrests, the highest annual totals in the agency's history. The figures, released on Thursday, November 12, 2026, cover the year that ran from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026, and are the most complete accounting so far of what the second Trump administration's enforcement drive has produced.
They are also contested. A nonpartisan research group at Syracuse University says the case-level records it obtained from the government show formal removals falling, not rising, since January 2025, because the headline number mixes removals with departures people make on their own.
What DHS put on the table
The deportation total exceeds ICE's previous record of 442,640 in fiscal 2025 and is nearly 78% above the 271,484 removals in fiscal 2024, the last full year under Joe Biden. DHS also measured it against the 409,849 removals of fiscal 2012, a long-standing high point under Barack Obama, and put fiscal 2026 about 18% above that mark.
Of the more than 491,000 arrests, nearly 475,000 were administrative — civil immigration violations rather than criminal charges. DHS calls that figure the highest in ICE's history and says the year's arrests exceeded Biden's three full fiscal years combined.
The monthly series shows where the volume came from: 43,900 arrests in June 2026, 50,208 in July and 50,925 in August, the single highest month. September closed with more than 48,000 arrests and about 44,000 removals.
Counting from January 2025 through October 31, DHS reports nearly 1.2 million deportations and more than 1.25 million arrests, and says more than 3 million people have left the country in that span, roughly 2 million of them without being removed.
"Fiscal Year 2026 saw the highest number of ICE deportations and arrests for any year in ICE's history," Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in the statement accompanying the data, adding that he "couldn't be prouder of the brave men and women of ICE."
The dispute over what counts as a deportation
The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which obtains federal enforcement data through Freedom of Information Act litigation, reads the same system differently. Working from ICE records current through August 24, 2026, drawn from the Enforcement Integrated Database covering more than 19 million people, TRAC says "the number of individuals removed from the United States actually declined after President Trump assumed office."
Its figures put removals at 30,893 in the first full month of the term and 26,908 in July 2026, a 13% drop, and it says the most removals in any recent fiscal year came in 2024.
The gap is definitional. TRAC's July and August data show formal removals accounting for 63% of what DHS counts as deportations, with voluntary departures at 31% and voluntary returns at 6%. The distinction matters legally: as TRAC notes, "removals bar an individual from legally returning to the United States for a period of years," while a voluntary departure does not. DHS has not said publicly which categories its own total includes.
Who was arrested
The fiscal 2026 release left out the breakdowns by criminal history and length of residence that earlier ICE annual reports carried, so the sharpest picture of who was detained comes from outside analyses.
The Migration Policy Institute found that about 20% of roughly 980,000 deportations carried out by ICE and Customs and Border Protection between January 2025 and July 2026 involved someone with a criminal conviction. Among people who had lived in the United States for at least two years before being deported, 71% had no conviction at all.
A CBS News analysis of ICE data found that in July 2026 more than half of the agency's arrests involved people with neither a conviction nor a pending criminal charge, and that about 6% of those booked into ICE detention during the term had a violent-crime conviction.
The capacity behind the numbers was bought in 2025, when the year's spending law set aside $45 billion to expand immigration detention.
A record the president has called too tough
The totals land in an unsettled political moment. Trump told "60 Minutes" that the crackdown had been "too tough," days before the agency publicized the records. In CBS News exit polling during the 2026 midterms, 58% of voters said immigration enforcement had gone too far, against 22% who called it about right and 20% who said it had not gone far enough.
Officials set an internal target of roughly 19,000 arrests a week before the midterms, and administration officials are not signaling a slowdown. Measured against the campaign pledge of one million deportations a year, fiscal 2026 came in at under half.
Reporting from CBS News and Yahoo News, with figures released by the Department of Homeland Security and analyses by TRAC at Syracuse University and the Migration Policy Institute.
