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By Dan Gooding
Associate News Editor
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Illegal migrants have been deported in record numbers over the past two months, official figures show.
The number of immigrant removals and returns from the United States exceeded totals for every full year since 2011, officials said Friday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said it had flown both single adults and families home to multiple South and Central American countries, as well as to China, in the first two weeks of July.
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The removal flights brought the total number of those removed in the past year to 742,000, many of whom had crossed the southwest border.
The number marks a significant increase on fiscal year 2023 (Oct. 2022-Sep. 2023), during which 142,580 people were removed, along with 62,545 Title 42 expulsions before the order was revoked in May 2023.
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In the past few weeks, removal flights have taken immigrants back to Central America, China, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru.
"If a noncitizen arrives and has no legal basis to remain in the United States they are processed and removed quickly, consistent with U.S. law," ICE said in its statement Friday.
Of those removed in the past 12 months, 111,000 were individual family members, the figures showed.
From July 2023 to May 2024, 2,377,158 people were encountered at the southwest border, with the number removed making up around 31% of that figure. However, those removed may have been in the country for some time pending their removal.
ICE said that the U.S. screened all noncitizens, to determine if they have legal basis for protection to remain in the country, before deciding whether to remove them.
"Noncitizens placed into removal proceedings present their claims for relief or protection from removal before immigration judges in the immigration courts, which are administered by the Justice Department's Executive Office for Immigration Review," ICE explained.
Under the Biden administration, deportations, or removals, have increased, with at least 1.1 million since 2021.
At the beginning of July, the Department of Homeland Security carried out its first large charter flight to China.
"We will continue to enforce our immigration laws and remove individuals without a legal basis to remain in the United States," Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas said in a press release at the time.
"People should not believe the lies of smugglers."
As of Jul. 2, around 120 repatriation flights to 20 countries had taken place following the President's Executive Order, heavily restricting border entries, introduced a month earlier.
Last week, a group of Congresspeople wrote to the DHS, complaining that not enough was being done to send more illegal migrants back to China, claiming that the country was refusing to accept those due for removal.
Donald Trump and the Republican party are promising to ramp up deportations should they regain the White House and both chambers of Congress in November.
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