ON THIN ICE

Trump’s Mass Deportation Humiliation Is Exposed

New ICE figures reveal an awkward truth for the president.

New ICE figures show President Donald Trump is on course for a record 458,000 deportations this year—barely half the one million removals pledge that he swept into power on.

The agency’s FY2026 detention statistics, posted quietly on July 20, show that 356,389 people were sent back to their home countries between October 1 and July 11—about 1,255 a day, according to analysis by PunchUp.

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At that pace, Trump, 80, will beat the all-time single-year record of 409,849 set in 2012 under Barack Obama, 64, that earned him the “Deporter-in-Chief” tag, the Daily Beast’s new sister investigations Substack reports.

But the record is still unlikely to endear Trump to his deportation-obsessed supporters, PunchUp says.

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Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, 40, and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, 54, demanded ICE hit at least 3,000 arrests a day in order to hit the one million deportations target. The Trump administration says that the current figure is around the 2,000 mark.

Who is being deported has changed, too, according to PunchUp. Roughly 55 percent of those Obama removed in his record year had criminal convictions. Of the 65,765 people in ICE detention on July 11, some 46,436—70.6 percent—have no criminal conviction at all, and 40.5 percent of everyone booked into detention this year had neither a conviction nor a pending charge.

Border czar Tom Homan, 64, admitted the shift on Fox News on July 18, saying “60 percent of everyone arrested right now is a criminal, 40 percent are non-criminal.”

The operation has also moved from the border into American neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of the 353,948 people booked into detention this fiscal year were seized by ICE in the interior, not caught at the border—and the machine is speeding up again, with 43,138 book-ins in June being the busiest month of the fiscal year thus far.

As PunchUp revealed in May, ICE’s daily arrest rate jumped from 226 in the 19 days before Trump’s inauguration to 544 in his first 12 days back—while the share of arrestees with no criminal charges rose from 58 to 69 percent. The administration denied that it had any arrest quota at all.

Asked about the surge, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told PunchUp at the time: “President Trump campaigned on and won an election based on his promise to deport criminal illegal aliens. The entire Administration is working to carry out the President’s agenda.”

The current record pace does, though, mark an acceleration. ICE logged 319,980 removals in the 2025 fiscal year, according to researcher Austin Kocher’s analysis of the agency’s year-end data, though ICE’s footnotes fold voluntary returns and expulsions into that count. After two years of ramping up immigration and tens of billions spent, deportation numbers are still barely half of Trump’s promise.

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A spokesperson for DHS told PunchUp that ICE was “delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens,” that “nearly 70 percent of ICE arrests” had been “charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S.,” and claimed, “more than 3 million illegal aliens are out of the country and counting.”

Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.

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Tom LatchemLead Global Correspondent

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