The Trump administration has promoted its immigration enforcement agenda with numeric targets, but researchers say key enforcement data has become harder to find, less reliable and more difficult to verify—at a time when arrests, detentions and deportations have surged. The concern, as described by experts and advocates, is not that DHS has stopped talking about enforcement, but that the underlying statistics needed to track changes and test official claims have been delayed, removed or replaced by figures that can be inconsistent.
In particular, the U.S. Office of Homeland Security Statistics—which has responsibility for publishing figures from Homeland Security agencies—has left some enforcement metrics untouched for extended periods. The office, created under the Biden administration and originally known as the Office of Immigration Statistics, has tracked immigration-related data since 1872. In its current form, it also published monthly reports that allowed researchers to follow developments more closely, but experts said key figures have not been updated since early last year and that a page note on the monthly reports says the reports are “delayed while it is under review.”
Advocates and researchers said the loss of those regularly updated datasets has disrupted how they evaluate immigration enforcement. Lawyers can struggle to cite consistent figures in litigation, journalists say they lose a tool for holding the government to account, and researchers say gaps make it harder to measure how quickly enforcement operations are changing. “We’re all a little bit in the dark about exactly how immigration enforcement is operating at a time when it’s taking new and unprecedented forms,” said Julia Gelatt, an associate director at the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
The reporting difficulties extend beyond the office’s monthly reports. Experts said an ICE interactive dashboard launched in December 2023 let users examine whom the agency was arresting, their nationalities, criminal histories and removal numbers, with ICE calling it a “new era in transparency.” Experts said that dashboard’s latest data is from January 2025 and that the agency’s annual report, typically released in December, had not been published as of mid-March.
Researchers said other parts of the broader federal data landscape have also slowed, creating a patchwork. They cited the State Department’s most recent visa issuance data as being from August and said statistics from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have not been updated since October. While some immigration-related information continues to roll out—such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics about border encounters and data from the Department of Justice’s immigration courts—experts said the missing enforcement numbers made it harder to study the effects of different policies.
DHS has disputed the premise that transparency has declined. In a statement, the department said, “This is the most transparent Administration in history, we release new data multiple times a week and upon reporter request.” DHS also did not respond to detailed questions about why it stopped releasing specific data. Researchers said the problem instead shows up in what they can actually retrieve and verify from public sources.
One example cited in the coverage involves deportation totals. In a Jan. 20 news release, DHS said it had deported more than 675,000 people since Trump returned to the White House. A day later, in a second release, DHS put the figure at 622,000, and in congressional testimony March 4, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the figure was 700,000. Researchers said those differences make it harder to confirm what the government is reporting and how the totals are being compiled.
The coverage also pointed to questions about other DHS figures. DHS has said 2.2 million people who were in the U.S. illegally have gone home on their own, but the department has given no explanation for the count. Experts said they have questioned the source of that number, noting DHS historically has not tracked the metric in the same way. DHS did not respond to questions about where that data came from.
Researchers and advocates said delays in access to enforcement details have pushed them toward secondary channels such as data required by Congress and records obtained through legal action. The publication of ICE detention figures—how many people are detained, for how long and whether they have committed a crime—is required by Congress and is generally released every two weeks, but the coverage said release timing has faced delays and later publications overwrite earlier data, complicating efforts to use the information consistently. The University of California, Berkeley’s Deportation Data Project, a research initiative, said it successfully sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain ICE arrest data, including nationalities, conviction status and whether arrests occurred at jails or in the community.
Graeme Blair, co-director of the project, said every administration has faced transparency challenges in immigration enforcement, but given Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement goals, the team wanted to “understand” and “double check” the figures the government might not publicly release. Blair said the dataset obtained through the lawsuit runs through Oct. 15 and does not cover more recent operations, including a Minneapolis enforcement surge that became the subject of demonstrations and scrutiny after federal immigration officers fatally shot two protesters.
The absence of frequently updated and verifiable immigration-enforcement statistics has drawn criticism across the political spectrum, according to the coverage. Mike Howell of the Oversight Project, a conservative group pushing for more deportations, said: “They aren’t publishing the data.” Howell also said DHS put out numbers in news releases “that purport to be statistics with no statistical backup,” and that the numbers “have jumped all over the place.” He said, “We deserve to know the numbers, just like we deserve to know who’s in our country and who needs to leave.”