U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 483,200 people in fiscal year 2026, the highest annual total in the agency's history, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on Thursday, November 12. The full-year figures give the first complete official count of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown — and they land a week after midterm elections in which Democrats won control of Congress promising to investigate the enforcement drive.

Source: The Insight International

ICE also made more than 491,000 immigration arrests in the 12 months to September 30, including nearly 475,000 administrative arrests — arrests made for civil immigration violations rather than criminal charges. DHS said both the arrest and deportation totals were records for the agency.

The numbers in full

The deportation total beats the previous high of 442,640, set in fiscal 2025, by about 9 percent, and is nearly 78 percent higher than the roughly 271,000 deportations recorded in fiscal 2024, the last full fiscal year under President Joe Biden. Arrests peaked over the summer: ICE arrested 50,208 people in July and 50,925 in August, each a monthly record at the time, before making more than 48,000 arrests and 44,000 removals in September.

"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 a statement. "Thanks to President Trump's leadership, ICE has been unleashed to target and remove illegal aliens so that we can save American lives." DHS also said that, as of October, the administration had deported nearly 1.2 million people and arrested more than 1.25 million since taking office — figures the department presents as cumulative totals across both fiscal years.

What the headline numbers do not show

The department did not say how many of those deported had criminal records, or how many were removed from inside the country rather than turned back at the border or at airports — a distinction that matters, because border turn-backs and interior arrests affect very different communities. The figures also do not separate formal removals from voluntary departures. An analysis of federal immigration records published on Wednesday by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that formal removals made up 63 percent of deportations in July and August, meaning a growing share — about 37 percent in those two months — were people who agreed to leave voluntarily or turned back, without a formal removal order and its penalties.

Source: NewsPoint Nigeria (CBS News figures)

That gap between the announcement and the underlying data is why the record is contested. Supporters of the administration point to the raw scale of arrests and removals as proof the crackdown is working. Critics, citing the TRAC analysis, argue that internal ICE data shows a large part of the increase comes from voluntary departures and border returns rather than removals of people living inside the United States, and that the agency's own deportation pace from the interior tells a more complicated story.

Background: how the record was built

The enforcement surge was funded at a scale no previous administration attempted. A spending law signed by President Trump in July 2025 allocated about $170 billion for immigration enforcement and border security, including $75 billion in additional funding for ICE, and the agency set a target of recruiting 10,000 new officers and agents within a single year. The crackdown also produced the administration's sharpest controversies: in January, federal immigration agents shot dead two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, during an enforcement surge in Minneapolis, in killings filmed by bystanders. Polling before the midterms showed the politics shifting — a Fox News poll in September found 53 percent of registered voters, and 60 percent of independents, felt the immigration crackdown had gone too far.

Why it matters for diaspora and trucking families

For Punjabi and other immigrant communities across the United States, the most important line in the release is the 475,000 administrative arrests: these are civil immigration cases — visa overstays, status violations and people encountered during other operations — not criminal convictions. Families with mixed immigration status, international students who have fallen out of status, and workers in trucking, warehouses, farms and restaurants are the people most exposed to that kind of enforcement, and immigration lawyers say the record pace means backlogs and detention stays are growing with it. Community organisations advise anyone detained to ask for a lawyer before signing a voluntary-departure agreement, because signing can carry long re-entry bars that a formal hearing might avoid.

What happens next

Democrats have said they will use their new congressional majorities to scrutinize ICE when the new Congress takes office in January. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat expected to chair the House Homeland Security Committee, said the party would investigate what he called the administration's "out of control immigration policies." President Trump, in a recent CBS 60 Minutes interview, acknowledged some people would think his policies were "too tough." Awaaz Punjab readers have followed this story through the year — including Secretary Mullin's November 5 remarks that deportations would continue despite the Democratic wins; Thursday's release is the official full-year count behind those remarks, and the January committee hearings are the next date to watch.