About 10 million people are estimated to be in the United States illegally, despite President Donald Trump's promise to deport them all.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the federal agency primarily in charge of enforcing immigration laws within the country. People removed by ICE include those apprehended at the border by Border Patrol agents, and people arrested by ICE agents within the country.
ICE recorded about 749,500 removals in total from fiscal years 2017 to 2019. (Fiscal year 2017 included about four months of the Obama administration.) The majority of people removed were arrested by Border Patrol agents, meaning they were people trying to get to the United States and not typically people who have lived in the country illegally for a long time.
In a report of fiscal year 2019 operations, ICE said that a surge in immigrants arriving at the border in 2019 "significantly impacted" its operations, forcing it to reassign 350 officers to the border.
The ICE report said that the high number of arrivals at the border, a backlog in immigration courts, high numbers of people avoiding arrest, plus Congressional and judicial constraints contributed to "extremely low" removals.
The Department of Homeland Security also publishes removals data — grouping the removals done by ICE and by Customs and Border Protection (such as "expedited removal" at the border). DHS data says that in fiscal years 2017 and 2018, there were around 625,000 removals, most of them done by ICE. (The latest DHS data available is up to fiscal year 2018.) The ICE removals that DHS reports are the same ones that ICE reports in its own annual reports.
(DHS also tracks "returns," which refers to the return of immigrants arriving at the border without placing them in formal removal proceedings. DHS recorded about 210,000 returns in total for 2017 and 2018.)
The number of immigrants illegally in the country changes as they are deported or leave on their own and as new groups arrive. For about a decade, the number has been around 11 million. Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated that in 2017 there were around 10.5 million immigrants living here without legal authorization. Available evidence suggests that the current number of immigrants here illegally is about 10 million, Pew told PolitiFact.
The population here illegally includes about 650,000 immigrants who came to the United States as children and are protected from deportation under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The U.S. Supreme Court in June rejected Trump's attempt to end the program, saying the administration did not follow the appropriate legal procedures. Trump's administration can try again to end it, the court said.
Trump has not succeeded in deporting all immigrants here illegally. We rate this a Promise Broken.