New report on Trump administration deportations

Welcome back. President Trump's immigration crackdown has been one of the most contentious issues of the midterm election. The latest ABC News Washington Post Ipsos poll shows 56 percent of Americans believe the administration has gone too far in deporting undocumented immigrants. A new report by the nonpartisan think tank, the Migration Policy Institute, looks at the level of deportations in the first 18 months of the president's second term. According to the MPI report, DHS completed 980,000 deportations during that period. MPI's analysis, which hasn't been verified by ABC News, found on an annualized basis, the number of deportations so far in 2026 are up 26 percent compared to the yearly average during the Biden administration. To help explain the report, we are joined by Mark Rosenblum, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and author of the study. Thanks so much for joining us, Mark. Thanks for having me. Now, the current DHS does not provide publicly this type of data routinely. So can you explain how you were able to come up with these data points? Sure. I use data that had been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California. And it's the exact same data that I used to use when I ran the Office of Homeland Security Statistics at DHS. I recognize the reports or, you know, the underlying data. So I know it's a valid source. And, you know, fortunately, it's out there for the public. And with so much or so few publicly available detailed data coming from DHS, how difficult is it to get a really full view of exactly who and why people are being deported? I mean, it is it is difficult. It's much harder than it should be. the government should be the most reliable source of government data, and it's unfortunate that DHS has stopped releasing reports. I ran reporting for DHS for over 10 years, and we released the data on a monthly basis. And it was much easier to know what was going on when we were releasing data. Fortunately, I know how to process the raw data that have been FOIAed. So this report is now available for people. And we'll be continuing to put information out. And I should point out that our own reporting shows a majority of immigrants who were arrested did not have criminal convictions. And your report noted that out of the nearly one million people deported over the 18 month period, some 20 percent had been convicted of a crime. But what were the most common offenses that you found? Right. Yeah. So as you said, only 20 percent have been convicted of any crime. And most of those, well, the most common crimes that they've been convicted of are nonviolent offenses. The most common type is immigration offenses, illegally crossing the border. And then the next most common type are traffic offenses. So most people who are not convicted of a crime and most people who are convicted of a crime are not convicted of violent crimes. And the nonviolent crimes clearly are what's at stake. How has the immigration enforcement process changed over these last 18 months? Well, we're seeing an increasing focus on finding people inside the United States. It's still the case that most people who are being deported are people who recently arrived at the border. But as border encounters have come way down, the administration is, you know, finding more people within the U.S. and being more successful at deporting people from within the U.S. So that's one big change. And then we're also seeing that there's a real reduction in the kind of due process that people go through before being deported. It used to be the case that most people deported from within the U.S. go before an immigration judge and, you know, have a day in court. And increasingly under this administration, people are not, are being held in detention and persuaded to accept voluntary departure, which is a form of deportation that doesn't allow you to go before a judge. Mark Rosenblum, thank you so much for sharing the reports and digging into the data for us. We appreciate it.