ANALYSIS: Trump Is Reusing Obama’s Tactics to Inflate His Deportation Numbers

An equation that doesn’t hold up without the border

Let’s look at the numbers objectively. ICE reports 442,000 deportations for fiscal year 2025. That’s already a considerable total, higher than what the Biden administration achieved over a comparable period. But it’s still far—very far—from the one million per year promised by Trump during the presidential campaign. Adding CBP’s border removals changes the picture. Tom Homan now speaks of more than 800,000 deportations. The difference between the two figures—nearly 360,000 cases—corresponds precisely to the people intercepted at the border and swiftly returned, often within a few hours, without a full judicial process.

Technically, these removals exist. They are documented. They are real. But grouping them into a single statistical category with ICE’s domestic arrests poses a serious methodological problem. The deportation of a worker who has lived in Chicago for fifteen years is entirely different from an immediate pushback in El Paso. The two do not require the same resources, do not affect the same populations, and do not produce the same human consequences. Confusing them renders the statistics unreadable. And that is precisely what Republicans criticized in 2012.

Promised Transparency, Actual Opacity

Homan also promised greater transparency. The promise is worth noting because it stands in contrast to current practice. The Office of Homeland Security Statistics, the official agency responsible for publishing federal immigration data, has not been regularly updated since late 2024. There is a gap of more than a year in the publicly available figures. Meanwhile, the “border czar” receives his daily 22-page briefing, but it remains confidential. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t share this with the American people,” he told the Washington Examiner. It’s a fine statement. It remains to be seen whether it will translate into actual publication.

Because control over statistics means control over the narrative. As long as the data remains in an envelope on a single man’s desk, political power retains total control over the narrative. It decides when to publish, how to publish, in what form, and with what level of detail. Immigrant advocacy groups, academic researchers, and specialized journalists have been calling for months for this data to be made public. Statistical opacity has, in and of itself, become a tool of governance.

I write these lines thinking of all the families who, behind these numbers, are waiting for news, a decision, a sign. For them, a twenty-two-page briefing locked away in a drawer is not an abstraction. It is their lives hanging in the balance at the discretion of a civil servant.

Lamar Smith, Jim Jordan, and the Wall of Silence

Lamar Smith’s 2012 press release remains available on the Judiciary Committee’s official website. Word for word. It describes Obama’s approach as an attempt to “deceive the American people.” It accuses the administration of “spin,” that is, narrative manipulation. It calls for a return to honest statistics, clearly distinguishing between domestic arrests and border apprehensions. At the time, this statement was widely picked up by conservative media outlets, Fox News, and Republican columnists. It formed part of the anti-Obama immigration narrative during the 2012 campaign.

Today, Smith’s political heirs are silent. Axios contacted several prominent Republican figures: Andrew Garbarino, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; Michael McCaul, vice chairman of the same committee; Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee; Michael Guest, chairman of the Subcommittee on Border Security; and Jim Jordan, current chairman of the Judiciary Committee and a member of that committee in 2012. None of them responded. The White House did not respond either. Silence is not a lack of a position. It is a position.

When Consistency Becomes a Luxury

One might think that this contradiction would trigger an internal crisis within the Republican Party. It does not. Because ideological consistency, in the current political climate, has taken a back seat to narrative effectiveness. What matters is delivering on the promise of one million deportations. It doesn’t matter how that million is counted. It doesn’t matter that the method used was denounced as dishonest just a few years earlier by the very same political figures. The end justifies the arithmetic.

The Democrats, for their part, find themselves in an uncomfortable position. Criticizing the method would amount to retroactively condemning Obama, who had used it to set records. Remaining silent would amount to endorsing Trump’s statistical strategy. The likely outcome: a technical debate drowned out by media noise, a brief controversy, and a gradual normalization of the expanded calculation. In ten years, no one will remember that these two categories were once counted separately. Administrative memory is like water that evaporates quickly.

There is something deeply troubling about the way statistical standards shift with the whims of the majority. This is no longer politics. It is pure narrative engineering. And every adjustment leaves yet another crack in the trust that citizens can still place in official figures.

Expedited removals are not traditional deportations

To understand what’s really at stake, we need to look at how the system works. Removals carried out by Customs and Border Protection at the border generally fall under two categories: expedited removal, which allows for removal without a hearing before an immigration judge, and the simple turnback of individuals intercepted before they have officially crossed the border. These procedures are swift, sometimes brutal, and often involve people who have never truly been present in the United States in the administrative sense of the term. Counting them as formal deportations—on the same footing as an ICE raid on a factory in Ohio—is to conflate two distinct legal realities.

The implications for public statistics are significant. When a president announces “one million deportations,” the public imagination conjures images of families torn from their homes, workers in handcuffs, and buses heading toward the border. But a large portion of that figure now refers to people who never left the border area, who never built a life in the United States, who were intercepted within minutes or hours of crossing. The word “deportation” has become a statistical catch-all. And public perception is distorted as a result.

Promised Transparency vs. Operational Reality

Homan promises to publish the daily briefing. That’s good news, in theory. But statistical transparency isn’t measured solely by the quantity of figures made public. It’s measured by their clarity, their granularity, and their methodological integrity. Publishing an aggregated total that conflates two distinct categories isn’t transparency. It’s public relations. True transparency would involve publishing ICE and CBP figures separately, detailing the types of procedures used, and providing demographic data by country of origin, by U.S. state, and by age group.

There is no indication, at this time, that the promised publication will go that far. Government briefs intended for internal use generally contain aggregated data, optimized for quick reading by policymakers. Making them public without academic reprocessing would be useful but insufficient. Migration policy researchers have long called for access to anonymized microdata, which is the only way to enable independent analysis. That request, however, remains unanswered.

I would like to believe in the promise of transparency. I really would. But recent experience with government agencies has taught me that promises of transparency often translate into partial Excel spreadsheets published as PDFs—unreadable by machines and disconnected from the original databases. True transparency is recognized by what it reveals, not by what it promises.

A Political Promise Turned into a Statistical Obsession

The figure of one million deportations per year is not a neutral administrative goal. It is a foundational political promise of Donald Trump’s campaign. It has been repeated at dozens of rallies, in television interviews, and in social media posts. Reaching this figure—or coming close to it—has become a matter of political credibility for the entire government apparatus. And when a political goal collides with operational reality, two options emerge: change reality, or change the metric. The Trump administration, like so many administrations before it, chose the second option.

This does not mean that ICE operations have not been stepped up. They have been. Arrests have increased. Deployments to sanctuary cities have multiplied. Budgets have ballooned. But the gap between the promise and operational reality remains such that a statistical adjustment became necessary to bridge the gap between rhetoric and the numbers. The million is no longer a goal. It is an accounting category.

The Boomerang Effect on Institutional Credibility

In the long term, this type of statistical manipulation erodes trust in federal institutions. When calculation methods change with each political transition, official figures lose their value as a benchmark. Historical comparisons become impossible. Independent analyses become more complicated. Specialized journalists must spend weeks reconstructing coherent data series. And at the end of the chain, the average citizen gives up. They no longer believe the official figures. They turn to emotional narratives, viral anecdotes, and shocking images shared online.

Paradoxically, this erosion benefits those in power. The less credible the numbers are, the more prominence the political narrative takes on. The less readable the statistics are, the more the president’s storytelling shapes public perception. In an environment where data has become suspect, the leader’s word becomes the sole compass. This is true for Trump. It was true for Obama. It will be true for his successors. Statistics are dead. Long live the narrative.

And meanwhile, in a small town in Texas, a mother waits to find out if her son was fired this morning. She doesn’t know which statistical category he’ll fall into. No one will tell her. The national figure will be published somewhere—in a briefing, a press release, or a tweet. But for her, there will just be an empty chair at the table tonight.

What Statistics Never Tell Us

It will take time to fully assess the effects of this methodological shift. Analysts will produce reports. Academics will publish articles. Think tanks will organize conferences. But behind every aggregate figure lies a displaced life, a shattered dream, a torn-apart family. Statistics, by their very nature, erase the individual. They aggregate. They average. They smooth things over. And that is precisely what makes them politically useful. One million deportations is an election promise. One million people is a humanitarian catastrophe. The plural makes everything more bearable. The plural numbs us.

History will judge. Not the method of calculation, which will be forgotten in ten years. But the political moment it reveals. A moment when consistency is no longer a value, when yesterday’s criticism becomes today’s practice without the slightest qualm, when transparency is promised as a slogan and postponed as a chore. Tom Homan may be right on one point: there is no reason to hide the numbers from the American people. But publishing is not the same as explaining. And counting is not the same as understanding.

I conclude this piece thinking about that daily briefing, those twenty-two pages circulating every morning through the hushed corridors of Washington. About what those pages contain. About what they leave unsaid. And about all the empty chairs, somewhere between El Paso and Chicago, which no statistic will ever truly account for.

Signed, Jacques Pj Provost, columnist