Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.
During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”
It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.
Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.
I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”
Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recently blamed Mullin, who took over from Noem in March.
Mullin has pushed back against critics, insisting that ICE enforcement is the most intense it’s ever been, and that officers averaged 4,200 daily arrests nationwide during the first week of August. DHS hasn’t published data backing that claim, though, and the most recent ICE data show that average daily arrests were less than half that amount in July. The discrepancy is typical of the way that immigration data tend to surface in social-media posts or in leaks to right-wing publications or influencers, not in the regular, apples-to-apples systematic way that Rosenblum’s former office was designed to deliver.
The fundamental problem is the same one that U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro faced when she had to tell the president the truth last week about the Reflecting Pool—that the damage to its lining was likely caused by a botched installation, not vandals. The White House’s benchmark for success—1 million deportations a year—has worked better as a rhetorical device than an achievable goal. ICE’s previous record for deportations was 432,238, set in 2013, according to DHS data. The gap between the president’s expectations and the reality of what ICE can pull off endangers the job of any DHS official who acknowledges numbers that fall short. No one wants to tell the president that his deportation claims have no clothes.
Trump’s return path to the White House was paved by embellished immigration data. Illegal border crossings reached an all-time high during the Biden administration, but Trump, Vice President Vance, and other administration officials have repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that 20 to 30 million immigrants illegally arrived during Joe Biden’s term. Last year, DHS published on X an idyllic image of a sandy beach with the caption, “America After 100 Million Deportations,” a figure whose basic math amounted to fantasizing about the forced removal of tens of millions of American citizens. Not to be outdone, the former Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino, who remains a hero of MAGA hard-liners, said that he wanted to arrest and deport 100 million people, equal to roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population.
The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates that the total number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States increased from 10.8 million in 2019 to 15.8 million in 2024. The Pew Research Center, another nonpartisan group, has similar estimates. White House officials including Stephen Miller have depicted Trump’s crackdown as an urgent remedy to the influx that occurred under Biden. But even as the administration ramps up deportations, it has added to the pool of potential deportees by stripping legal status from more than 1.5 million immigrants who were living and working in the United States with Temporary Protected Status or another form of provisional permission. The number of people whose immigration status the administration has rendered illegal over the past 18 months has so far outpaced the number of immigrants ICE has actually deported.
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I spoke to opponents of the administration as well as to Republican supporters frustrated by the lack of transparency and the “self-deportation” estimates DHS has used in lieu of hard data. “I don’t care what the data says. Just give it to me,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge at the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C. think tank that backs Trump’s deportation agenda, told me. He said that the only way to get beyond “the partisan chatter” and allow the public to fairly assess the deportation campaign is for the administration to release reliable counts of the number of people ICE has arrested, detained, and deported.
The ICE website periodically publishes enforcement statistics, but the site went dark from April until July, a period during which ICE arrests and deportations lagged behind the levels reached under Noem. The administration blamed Democrats and the congressional shutdown for the data lapse, but officials I spoke with at DHS told me that staff members working through the shutdown could have continued updating the ICE site. When the agency resumed publishing its statistics last month, arrests and deportations were once more on an upswing.
Mike Howell, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation who worked in the DHS legal office during Trump’s first term, sued the administration last month to force the release of more ICE data. Howell runs a campaign, the Oversight Project, to press the administration to deliver on Trump’s promises, and he helped launch the Mass Deportation Coalition to rally like-minded groups who see themselves as competing for the president’s sympathies with pro-business interests. “The Trump administration’s deportation numbers should be released with the same transparency, regularity, meaningful metrics, and fanfare as other government numbers, like the jobs report,” Howell wrote in a press release after filing the lawsuit. “Americans should be able to track and cheer progress the same way they watch the stock market.”
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Howell told me he wants to see the administration target employers and sweep through farms and factories rather than make individual stops in U.S. cities. “It’s the mass-deportation coalition’s view that people aren’t going to leave unless the deportation numbers are much, much larger,” Howell said. His suspicion, he said, is that the administration exaggerates its enforcement data to merely look tough, as a way to prepare the political terrain for a deal with Democrats after the midterms that would provide legal status to some portion of the unauthorized-immigrant population—the scenario that Howell and his allies abhor as “amnesty.”
During Trump’s first term, when record numbers of Central American families crossed the southern border illegally, DHS officials delayed many releases of monthly data until they could package the numbers in a press release with a favorable spin. The Biden administration initially did this, too, but as it faced intense criticism over record numbers of illegal crossings and images of chaos at the southern border, DHS officials came under pressure from lawmakers from both parties to share more data. The department’s most recent appropriations bill includes new oversight provisions requiring DHS officials to publish more data, but compliance remains spotty.
The Office of Homeland Security Statistics was set up outside the typical political review process for a reason, Blas Nuñez-Neto, the top border-policy official at DHS under Biden, who helped start the office and was Rosenblum’s supervisor, told me. “With all of these independent statistical units—whether it’s the Bureau of Labor Statistics or some of the other statistical agencies—what makes them special is that they’re supposedly not reporting to political appointees; they’re just producing raw data,” Nuñez-Neto said.
Nuñez-Neto acknowledged that immigration statistics aren’t the same as economic indicators, because immigration data are a measure of a given administration’s own performance on border enforcement—the pace of deportations, for example. “What OHSS was doing was to report on data that is internal to the department’s functioning,” he said, “so there was always a bit of tension.”
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During the final year of Biden’s term, as a bipartisan group of senators attempted to negotiate a new border-security deal (which Trump eventually killed), lawmakers funded Rosenblum’s office at levels beyond its requested amount. His team began producing the kinds of user-friendly data tables that allowed the broader public to compare key statistics over time. Their last data set was published January 16, 2025, four days before Trump returned to office.
Rosenblum, who declined to be interviewed, said in his LinkedIn post that it’d been “an honor to serve the public by improving DHS data quality and supporting evidence-based policymaking,” and added a parting shot at the administration. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change,” he said.
DHS officials have not said when, or if, Rosenblum’s office will resume publishing monthly reports. In the meantime, others are happy to fill the void. Last weekend, the Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvert wrote on X that he was told by “a source at DHS” that the department had compiled a report that states there have been 1,461,529 “total alien forced departures” over the past 12 months.
In the comments below the post, which had more than 700,000 views, Kolvert said he wasn’t sure how “total alien forced departures” were calculated. The category is not one used by the DHS statistics office, and although Kolvert claimed that the report had already “dropped,” it has not been published anywhere.
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