WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration likes to use numbers to drive its immigration enforcement agenda, with its ambitious goal of deporting 1 million people, reporting zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border and arresting thousands of suspected gang members.
Despite all the bragging, the current administration is releasing less reliable and less scrutinized data than previous administrations on a signature policy that has become one of the most controversial of Trump’s second term.
Information gaps and data losses at the office that track immigration data dating back to the 1800s have left researchers, advocates, lawyers and reporters without vital statistics to hold the Republican administration accountable.
“They’re not releasing the data,” said Mike Howell, director of the Conservative Oversight Project, an advocacy group that pushes for more deportations. Instead, Howell said, the Department of Homeland Security released numbers in a press release that “claimed to be statistics without statistical support, but the numbers were all over the place.”
New restrictions and increased enforcement have led to a surge in immigration arrests, detentions and deportations as mass deportations become a priority.
But finding metrics that once measured these changes can be difficult. It’s an extension of earlier efforts to restrict the flow of government information by cleaning up or deleting federal data sets or last year firing top officials responsible for overseeing employment data.
Important data is no longer public
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics publishes data from homeland security agencies, including the number of deportations and the nationalities of deportees, to provide a comprehensive understanding of immigration trends at the U.S. border and within its borders.
Originally called the Office of Immigration Statistics, it has been tracking this type of data since 1872. In its current form, created by the Biden administration, it has also begun publishing monthly reports, allowing researchers to track developments in near real-time.
But key enforcement indicators on its website have not been updated since early last year. A note on the page containing the monthly report said the report was “delayed pending review.”
“This is the most timely data. This is the most reliable data,” Austin Koch, a research professor at Syracuse University who closely follows trends in immigration data, said of the monthly report. “It has the most comprehensive view of immigration enforcement across the agency.”
The interactive dashboard launched by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in December 2023 had let users check who the agency was arresting, their nationalities, criminal records and deportation numbers. ICE calls it a “new era of transparency.”
Although intended to be updated quarterly, the latest data is from January 2025. The agency’s annual report, usually released in December, had not been released as of mid-March.
Other agencies also release data involving immigrants, and some of that data does continue to roll out, such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s statistics detailing border encounters or the Department of Justice’s immigration court data.
But experts say other data have slowed.
The latest visa issuance data from the State Department is from August. Key USCIS statistics have not been updated since October.
The missing data now help researchers study the impact of different policies. Lawyers can cite this data to support their lawsuits. Journalists see in it a powerful tool for holding governments accountable for public claims or reporting on important trends.
“At a time when immigration enforcement is taking on unprecedented new forms, we are all in the dark about exactly how immigration enforcement works,” said Julia Gelatt, deputy director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to detailed questions about why it is no longer releasing specific data.
“This is the most transparent government in history and we release new data multiple times a week in response to requests from journalists,” the department said in a statement.
Researchers grapple with piecing together numbers
Data released by the government are inconsistent and cannot be verified.
In a Jan. 20 press release, the Department of Homeland Security said it had deported more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, the department put the number at 622,000 in a second report. On March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem testified before Congress that the number was 700,000.
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security, also released data on the number of people who have been removed from the country as part of a larger release of data mandated by Congress. An Associated Press analysis of the numbers showed the number was about 400,000 in Trump’s first year in office.
The Department of Homeland Security said that 2.2 million people in the United States illegally returned home on their own, but the department did not provide any explanation for the number. Experts have questioned the origin of that number, saying it is not data the Department of Homeland Security has historically tracked.
The department did not respond to questions about where the data came from.
With key data sources shut down, researchers, advocates and others have had to rely on information that governments are obligated to report or come to light through legal action.
Congress requires the release of ICE detention data — how many people were detained, for how long and whether they committed crimes — typically every two weeks. But the release of these data has encountered some delays, and each new publication overwrites its data, complicating the work of those who need to access the data.
UC Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project is a research initiative that successfully filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain data on ICE arrests, including national origin, conviction status and whether the arrest occurred in jail or in the community.
Graeme Blair, co-director of the project, said every administration has struggled with transparency in immigration enforcement, and given the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement goals, the team wanted to secure and verify information that the administration might not release publicly.
“Given the scale of what they’re talking about, it seems really important to be able to understand, to be able to scrutinize those numbers,” he said.
But there are limitations, he said. The data obtained through the lawsuit only lasts until October 15. It does not include recent actions, such as a surge in enforcement in Minneapolis when federal immigration officers shot and killed two protesters, leading to widespread demonstrations and a review of enforcement tactics.
The lack of data is one of the few issues that has drawn bipartisan criticism.
“We should know the numbers just like we should know who is in our country and who needs to leave,” Howell said.