Carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history

Trump promised the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, larger than the 1954 operation under President Eisenhower. In office he signed Executive Order 14159 (January 20, 2025), which directs total enforcement of immigration law, wider expedited removal, more detention and more voluntary departures. He also signed H.R. 1 (July 4, 2025), which gives ICE $45 billion for detention and $29.85 billion for hiring and enforcement through September 2029.

Results depend on which count is used. ICE's posted removal series showed 319,980 for fiscal 2025 through September 20, 2025. An ICE contracting document says ICE removed about 421,182 people in fiscal 2026 through August 24, 2026, about 9.3% of whom self-deported. ICE says this series includes returns such as voluntary departures, so it is not a strict count of formal removals. ICE's budget justification reports a separate fiscal 2025 figure of 442,637 "returns and removals." Both figures include returns, and DHS has not explained the gap of about 120,000 between them. On ICE's posted series, fiscal 2025 was below ICE's 409,849 removals in fiscal 2012 and DHS's 438,421 removals in fiscal 2013 (432,228 in DHS's 2019 yearbook). On the budget measure, it is numerically above both. The fiscal 2026 count through August 24 is above the 2012 figure but below DHS's 2013 figure. The older figures differ in scope: ICE's 409,849 for fiscal 2012 also counts some returns, while DHS-wide formal removals were 415,607 in fiscal 2012 and 432,228 in fiscal 2013, and DHS-wide removals plus returns were 646,714 and 611,204.

The 1954 baseline is also disputed. The Border Patrol reported 1,035,282 apprehensions in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1954, most of them before the operation began. The INS later claimed that as many as 1.3 million people left or were removed. DHS's historical series records 17,695 removals and 232,769 returns in fiscal 1955, when most of the operation took place, for a total of 250,464. Official records also show about 254,000 apprehensions that year. Separately, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández estimates that the Border Patrol apprehended fewer than 300,000 people during the 1954 campaign. DHS's historical series, which counts border returns as well as removals, records 1,104,541 for fiscal 1954 (30,264 removals and 1,074,277 returns) and its peak of 1,864,343 in fiscal 2000 (188,467 removals and 1,675,876 returns). Those totals are mostly returns at the border, so they are not clean measures of an interior deportation operation, but they show how much the answer depends on the measure.

The rating is in progress rather than kept because whether a record has been set depends on which series is used, and the year-end fiscal 2026 total had not been published by mid-October 2026. A record on one measure is not yet a like-for-like record. DHS's larger figures (more than 675,000 "deportations" and an estimated 2.2 million "self-deportations" in the first year) have not been independently verified. DHS has not disclosed what the 675,000 includes, so it cannot be compared directly with ICE-only or formal-removal records. The promise is not rated broken because the administration has taken major, sustained steps toward it, removals are rising and the term runs to January 2029.