A former top statistics official who resigned from the Department of Homeland Security this summer says the government is overstating how many unauthorized immigrants have left the country during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Marc Rosenblum, whose blistering resignation letter from a decade-long career at DHS garnered national attention, is behind a new estimate published Thursday that says between 790,000 and 1.9 million immigrants departed the U.S. from Jan. 20, 2025, to July 31, 2026.
The Trump administration has said more than 3 million unauthorized immigrants have left during that period, but has not explained how it reached the number. The new analysis from the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank where Rosenblum is now a senior fellow, is an attempt to fill in the gap of information left by DHS’s lack of reporting.
“It’s highly unlikely that 3 million total foreign-born [people] departed the United States in the first 18 months of the Trump administration, and even more unlikely that 3 million unauthorized immigrants departed during that time period,” Rosenblum said.
Trending
MPI’s analysis didn’t include immigrants who had lived in the U.S. less than a year because that wouldn’t match the common understanding of what it means to reduce the size of the unauthorized population, Rosenblum said.
The think tank said its estimate increases to 1.3 million to 2.4 million total departures — still short of the government’s number — when accounting for those who had been present in the country less than a year, as well as people turned around at the border without setting foot inside the U.S., whom the government does include in its count.
Rosenblum said DHS counts people who were turned aside at border entry points before entering the country as well as those who overstay visas by a few days. And the government doesn’t gather data on most people who leave the U.S. through the southern border, he said.
Researchers lack information about how the government counts that 3 million number. Republican lawmakers and immigration hawks have called for transparency from DHS, wanting to see the results of Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts.
The White House once again touted on Tuesday the more than 3 million departures, saying in a press release that it has deported or removed nearly 1.2 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said deportations are at a record high.
Although MPI’s analysis contests the department’s accounting of total departures, the think tank concluded that the number of immigrants who left was two to three times higher than in the past 12 years.
“Most of the numbers are not at all-time highs,” Rosenblum said.
Among other data, MPI used information forced out of the administration through public records lawsuits from the Deportation Data Project and Mexican census data capturing the number of the country’s nationals who returned after living in the U.S.
DHS hasn’t been responsive to requests for immigration enforcement data from the Oversight Project, a group that supports the president’s crackdown on illegal immigration and has filed two lawsuits demanding records on deportations and self-deportations.
“I have no reason to doubt the 3 million figures, but also have no reason to believe it until they release the actual data,” said Neal Cornett, the project’s director of state litigation. “It’s just a claim from the Department of Homeland Security, and there should be data that they would have that would be able to confirm that.”
The Oversight Project requested records showing the number of immigrants who have self-deported via a Customs and Border Protection app and the amount of money DHS has spent on stipends for those immigrants, according to documents Cornett shared with The Washington Sun.
DHS gave the group an entirely redacted document on Oct. 8. The department claimed the records were protected under exemptions that shield law enforcement information that “would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigation or prosecution,” according to a letter DHS sent to the Oversight Project.
“It’s not like we’re asking the exact details of it, or how these people would be contacting them or anything like that,” Cornett said. “We just want to know what the numbers are.”
A White House spokesperson referred questions to DHS, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Author
