The shooting deaths of two immigrants at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the past week have brought the Trump administration’s violent crackdown into sharp relief once again, triggering protests and calls for accountability. But the government has kept the total number of people caught up in enforcement efforts under wraps since April, angering conservatives and progressives alike.
Dozens of immigrants have died in ICE detention since Trump took office. In recent days, two people, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero, have been fatally shot by ICE agents. In a midterm election year, experts say the need for transparency is urgent. Voices on the political right want proof the president is delivering on his promise to deport millions of people, while others on the left want to know how much damage has been done in immigrant communities.
“Even if there is a good reason for not releasing this information, it still gives the impression they are trying to hide something,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restrictions on legal immigration. “They should be worried about giving that impression because they are already under so much scrutiny.”
ICE hasn’t released its semimonthly “Detention Management” report on arrests, detentions and deportations since April 9, when the agency reported holding more than 60,000 people in custody.
News media, think tanks and academia have requested the missing data, and ICE has refused to deliver it, sparking at least three separate lawsuits, including one by a far-right group demanding the “true deportation statistics.”
In an email, the Department of Homeland Security told The Marshall Project that, through June 24, the administration had arrested more than 981,000 people and deported 948,000 since Trump took office in January 2025.
An ICE spokesperson blamed a series of government shutdowns for what the agency described as a delay in publishing the data. “ICE is working diligently to the report [sic] and corresponding data out as soon as possible,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Months-long shutdowns have occasionally slowed the publication of data in the past, but “the government has been open for a while, and these reports should be routine,” Vaughan said.
Homeland Security also said “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. … including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations” in Trump’s first year back in office. The department has not said how it defines or tracks so-called self-deportations, or where the number came from.
“I think everybody’s aware that the numbers being thrown around via press releases and on social media don’t exactly check out,” said Mike Howell, director of the right-wing public policy nonprofit The Oversight Project, on a podcast with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon.
The Oversight Project sued the Trump administration for immigration enforcement data earlier this month, seeking records that back up the administration’s claims.
Howell’s start-up, an offshoot of the conservative Heritage Foundation, joins the list of news and nonprofit organizations seeking records.
The Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA, which publishes immigration data received from ICE, has also sued the administration; The Marshall Project has filed an amicus brief in support of the complaint. The lawsuit seeks records that “provide a quantitative window into how the U.S. government is carrying out immigration enforcement and how it compares to past administrations.”
The Deportation Data Project has become a go-to source for reporters and researchers, building on work compiling immigration data by groups like the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. It files Freedom of Information Act requests, sues when agencies stall and posts the raw files online for free, with tools to filter to a specific state or rough locality. Transparency advocates say this work shouldn’t absolve ICE of its duty to publicly report its data.
Since 2019, Congress has required ICE to publish detailed arrest, detention and deportation data in a report due every two weeks. The mandate was included in the 2020 Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Bill with bipartisan support.
The statute is explicit: The ICE director “shall make available a report, on a publicly accessible website in a downloadable, searchable, and sortable format,” updated semimonthly. In the report, ICE tracks and publishes detailed information on the state of immigration enforcement, including: the number of people detained, where they’re being held and for how long, and how many have been deported.
For the past six years, ICE has largely complied with the congressional data-reporting mandate. There were short delays on occasion, including last fall during a prolonged government shutdown — but the current gap is the longest, experts say.
“It’s important for us to know what our government is doing, especially in the Trump administration, which is known for its fabulism,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, a think tank that provides pro bono deportation defense and advocates for immigration reform.
Deportation flights, tracked independently by the nonprofit Human Rights First, continue to rise. But without official statistics, experts say, the full scope and consequences of the mass deportation program are impossible to know.
Because the transparency requirement was embedded in an appropriations bill, there is some debate about whether ICE is still legally required to report the data, Reichlin-Melnick said. The government has been operating since last year with funding approved under a process known as “reconciliation,” which Republicans could pass with a simple majority vote.
Under two separate reconciliation bills, Congress has given the Department of Homeland Security more than $240 billion for immigration enforcement through fiscal year 2029 — more money than the department has ever had. The first tranche of funding included $45 billion specifically for ICE detention.
For ICE to claim at any point since then that they were lacking funds “is not only disingenuous; it’s counter-factual,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for the rights of low-income immigrants.
“As part of good governance, ICE should be reporting this basic data,” she said. “It shouldn’t require congressional instructions to do so.”
Other Homeland Security agencies have continued to provide timely information. Customs and Border Protection has updated its dashboard of migrant encounters through May, and ICE itself has continued to publish new 287g agreements through May.
Public data is “a form of accountability,” Vaughan said. “Voters are interested in this, and they’re going to be making decisions in many cases on the president’s record on immigration.”
