Alright, let’s do something unusual in political commentary. Let’s tell the truth about our own side.
Trump’s immigration enforcement has been historic. That’s not spin. The border is effectively shut. Illegal crossings have plummeted. Border Patrol hasn’t released a single illegal migrant into the country for nine months straight. The foreign-born population declined for the first time in over half a century. These are real accomplishments that no honest person can deny.
But the deportation numbers? They need a closer look. And the administration’s reluctance to provide that look is starting to become a problem.
The Headline Number vs. The Real Number
The Trump administration celebrated 675,000 deportations in fiscal year 2025. Kristi Noem said it. The White House touted it. It sounded massive, and it was meant to.
But internal ICE data obtained by the Daily Caller tells a different story. Between October 1, 2025 and late February, ICE conducted just over 35,500 actual deportations — meaning physical removals of people under a formal order issued by an immigration judge, escorted onto a plane or to a port of entry and expelled with a legal bar on re-entry.
At that pace, ICE is on track for roughly 85,000 actual court-ordered removals by the end of fiscal year 2026.
That’s a big number by Biden standards — his administration barely managed 59,000 removals in fiscal 2021. But it’s a far cry from 675,000, and the gap between those two figures matters.
The Counting Game
Here’s how the math works. The 675,000 figure lumps together actual deportations with border turnarounds, voluntary departures, and expedited removals processed through Customs and Border Protection. People turned away at the border get counted. People who agreed to leave voluntarily get counted. People handed off from CBP to ICE detention get counted as ICE removals.
None of those are fake enforcement actions. Turning someone around at the border is real. Voluntary departures reduce the illegal population. But they’re not the same thing as a federal agent physically putting someone on a plane after an immigration judge ordered them removed.
A DHS source inside the agency put it bluntly: the actual deportation number “is the only metric that means someone actually left. Not an arrest, not a detention, not a voluntary departure, not a border turnaround — a completed, executed deportation with a paper trail in ICE’s system.”
When the administration uses the big number without that context, they’re doing exactly what they accused Biden of — playing games with statistics.
The Delayed Report
There’s another red flag. ICE has historically released its annual enforcement report in December. The 2022, 2023, and 2024 reports all came out in December of their respective years. The 2025 report? Still unreleased as of March 2026.
The last time an ICE annual report was delayed this long was in March 2022 — when the Biden administration was sitting on the lowest deportation numbers in ICE history and didn’t want them public.
That comparison should make every Trump supporter uncomfortable. If the numbers are strong, release them. If you’re proud of the enforcement record, put it on the table. Delaying the report while trumpeting inflated headline figures is the kind of move that erodes credibility with the very base that sent Trump to Washington to fix this problem.
The Real Obstacles
To be fair to the administration, the bottlenecks aren’t all self-imposed. The back end of the enforcement system is a disaster that no president built and no single term can fix.
The immigration court backlog exceeds three million cases. Three million. Every illegal migrant with a halfway decent lawyer can use the court system to delay deportation for years. High-profile cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia show how the system can completely torpedo removal orders.
Then there are recalcitrant governments. Countries like Venezuela historically refused to accept their citizens back, making deportation physically impossible regardless of how many ICE agents you hire. Venezuela has become more cooperative since the Trump administration helped oust Maduro, but the problem exists across dozens of countries.
The administration is working on these issues — military judges to reduce the backlog, third-country deportation agreements, withholding aid from uncooperative nations. These are real solutions to real structural problems. But they take time, and in the meantime, the gap between the headline number and the actual deportation figure keeps growing.
The Honest Assessment
Here’s where Bob gets constructive, because this matters too much for cheerleading.
Trump has accomplished something extraordinary on the front end. The border is closed in a way it hasn’t been in decades. Illegal crossings are at historic lows. The signal to the world is unmistakable — America enforces its borders.
But the promise wasn’t just to close the border. It was mass deportation. It was removing the millions of people who entered illegally under Biden and are now living in American communities, using American resources, and in some cases committing American crimes.
At 85,000 actual removals per year, that promise is decades away from fulfillment. The Mass Deportation Coalition — a group of major conservative organizations including FAIR — wants one million deportations by the end of 2026. That’s the right target. And the administration is nowhere close to the pace required to hit it.
More ICE agents help. More funding helps. More court capacity helps. But the numbers suggest that the enforcement machine is still stuck in second gear while the administration is marketing it as fifth.
What Needs to Happen
Transparency, first and foremost. Release the 2025 annual report. Break out the numbers — actual removals versus turnarounds versus voluntary departures. Let the public see the full picture, because the full picture still favors Trump over every Democrat who held office in the last two decades.
Then, acceleration. Worksite enforcement to make hiring illegals too risky for employers. Visa overstay crackdowns — the forgotten half of illegal immigration. Aggressive pursuit of every migrant with an outstanding removal order.
And stop inflating the headline number. It’s unnecessary. The real accomplishments — a closed border, a declining foreign-born population, record arrests — are genuinely impressive. They don’t need statistical padding. The padding only creates a credibility problem when reporters inevitably dig into the details.
The Bottom Line
Trump’s immigration enforcement is lightyears ahead of Biden’s. That’s true and important. But “better than the worst” isn’t the standard Trump set for himself. He promised the biggest deportation operation in American history. The base expects it. The mandate demands it.
The front end is working. The back end needs to catch up. And the numbers need to be honest — not because the media deserves it, but because the voters who made this their top priority deserve to know exactly where things stand.
Bob’s always going to be straight with you, even when it’s our side that needs to hear it. The border is secure. The deportation machine needs more horsepower. And the administration should trust its supporters enough to tell them the whole truth, not just the headline.