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By Dan Gooding
Associate News Editor
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The Trump administration has hit the ground running on its pledge to begin mass deportations of migrants in the country illegally, conducting high-profile raids in cities from New York to Denver over its first full week. Even still, if deportations continue at their current rate, it would take around 28 years to deliver on the president's promise to repatriate upwards of 11 million people.
Public data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flight tracking, analyzed by a third-party expert and shared with Newsweek, showed there had been three deportation flights on military planes since President Trump took office last Monday, with fewer regular ICE aircraft making those trips.
"They're intending to do a lot more. Their intent to deport a lot more people from the interior and that would require, obviously, a lot more resources," Tom Cartwright, from the left-leaning Witness at the Border advocacy group, told Newsweek Tuesday.
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Newsweek reached out to the White House and ICE for comment.
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Why It Matters
President Trump was elected, in part, for his promises of mass deportations of illegal immigrants, which he pledged would start from the day he returned to the White House. Recent polling has reflected strong support from both Republicans and Democrats for policies addressing a broken immigration system and poor border security.
Still, the breadth of Trump's campaign promise to deport every illegal migrant in the country has run up against the typical bureaucratic headwinds of resources and money. Tom Homan, the new "border czar," has said the administration will need Congress to earmark at least $86 billion for the deportation initiative, acknowledging it will be "expensive" but arguing it will be worth the cost.
What To Know
The estimates of how many migrants are in the U.S. illegally vary, with the best guesses from the federal government and Pew Research settling on around 11 million. Not all of them are on ICE's radar for deportation, however.
Data released in December showed there were at least 1,445,549 citizens from 208 countries awaiting removal across the U.S., with several thousand more being held in facilities across the country.
Cartwright said that over the past six months, there have been an average of 126 removal flights carried out by ICE per month, with around 115 people on each plane, meaning around 3,500 people were deported monthly. On top of that, between 15,000 and 17,000 people were returned to Mexico by land.
In its annual report for 2024, the last full year of the Biden presidency, ICE said it had removed 271,484 people, the most since 2019. The agency said this was, in part, because of successful negotiations with other nations to keep migrants away.
Military vs. Commercial Flights for Deportations
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Mexico frequently accepts around five flights each Tuesday, Cartwright said, but this did not happen the day after Inauguration Day. Mexico had said it would not accept military flights. It was unclear as of Tuesday morning whether regular service had resumed.
Colombia sent its own aircraft to pick up around 200 deportees Monday, following a stand-off between Washington and Bogota over the weekend. Deportees told local media they had been picked up at the U.S.-Mexico border after their requests for asylum were denied. None of those 200 people had criminal records in either country, according to the Colombian government.
On Friday, the White House shared photos of illegal immigrants being walked onto a military plane in handcuffs. The total number of migrants and their destination was not made public.
Cartwright said using military cargo planes, a new initiative, was not necessarily an efficient way of repatriating migrants. While the White House did not share numbers or destinations, the military flights could only realistically carry around 80-84 people, compared to about 120 who can fit on the average commercial aircraft, Cartwright said.
"Not only are these flights, in my view, inhumane because loading people on cargo planes is, in my view, just another form of a perp walk, but they're also not efficient," he said.
Data compiled by Witness at the Border showed 90 deportation flights so far in January. In the final two weeks of the Biden administration, the daily average was around 5.5 flights per day. That dropped to 4.8 flights per day in the past week.
The total number of deportations is harder to come by. ICE publishes some data publicly, but it is updated infrequently and does not necessarily give a complete picture of its work. The agency has also argued in court that it cannot always fulfill requests for data.
How Many People Has ICE Arrested in Last Week?
Since Trump took office, ICE and the White House have been publishing daily updates on the number of immigrants arrested or placed under immigration detainers, which is not the same as the number of deportees. An immigration detainer means federal agents should be notified by local law enforcement before an individual is released so they can be handed over for removal proceedings.
While still early, the arrest and detainer numbers, reflecting the previous day's activity, show a notable rise under the new administration. On Monday, 969 arrests were logged along with 869 detainers. Reported arrests have topped 1,000 twice so far.
During Fiscal Year 2024, which ran from October 2023 through September 2024, the average daily arrest rate was 310 for ICE officers, while detainers were around 409. The previous administration did not actively post about such activity, however, and not all immigration enforcement activity is made public.
The Trump administration is going to be under growing pressure to deliver on its promises to carry out deportations that number in the millions rather than thousands. Under many ICE posts on social media, multiple users can be seen replying that the figures are "rookie numbers" that need to be ramped up.
Austin Kocher, an immigration expert who teaches at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that Trump's sweeping campaign pledges on immigration have the potential of creating a new host of problems at agencies tasked with carrying out his promises.
"The problem with that, and this is true for the Obama administration, for the first Trump administration, for Biden, and now for Trump again, the truth is that kind of political pressure creates an incentives structure for the administrations to say things that are politically expedient, regardless of whether they are really defensible," he said. "So that's where amount of healthy skepticism is really crucial."
Homan, the new border czar, appeared to acknowledge in an interview over the weekend that it would not be possible to deport everyone in the U.S. illegally and repeated that the idea was to target those who had committed serious or violent crimes while in the country illegally.
But in her first press briefing Tuesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt expanded on that when asked by a reporter how many of those who have already been deported had a criminal record. "All of them," she said. "Because they illegally broke our nation's laws and therefore they are criminals."
What People Are Saying
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the briefing Tuesday: "To foreign nationals who are thinking about trying to illegally enter the United States – think again. Under this President you will be detained and you will be deported. Every day Americans are safer because of the violent criminals that President Trump's administration is removing from our communities."
Democratic California Senator Alex Padilla, on X, on the fears felt by migrants in the state: "We're one week into the Trump administration and already we're starting to see the impacts and cruelty of his radical mass deportation agenda. Let's make one thing clear: these indiscriminate deportations won't make us safer. They will only mean higher prices for everyone."
What's Next
With more raids across the country in recent days, including in New York City Tuesday morning, ICE is expected to continue to increase its enforcement alongside other agencies in the coming weeks, while the White House will seek to show it is delivering on Trump's promises by showcasing the raids on social media and in the press.
Update 1/30/25, 11:54 a.m. ET: This article was updated with new information.
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