“… AT the time of Trump’s inauguration, around 13,000 people were being deported each month; now, the figure is approaching 30,000, after nine months of sustained increases. In total, according to official ICE data, 168,841 people were deported between January and August. This is still far from ‘the largest deportation in history,’ and even from the more realistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.
“Although the Trump administration has cited higher figures without providing evidence, its data includes all people who have voluntarily left the country in response to the immigration climate created by the president, including people with green cards. Still, the total number of deportations, whether ordinary or ‘self-deportations,’ as the administration has chosen to call them, is still far from ‘the highest in history.’
“Among existing records of past mass deportations, Operation Wetback — former president Dwight Eisenhower’s mass expulsion of Mexican workers who had arrived in the United States in the 1930s and during World War II — remains far ahead, with an estimated two million deportees, half of whom were U.S. citizens. And during former president Barack Obama’s two terms in office, three million people were deported, making the Democratic former president the ‘deporter-in-chief.’ However, with more than three years of his term still remaining and unprecedented new funding for ICE, surpassing that of other agencies like the FBI and the DEA, Trump still has time to fulfill his promise.”
