Who Deported More? Measuring Removals, Returns, and Enforcement Priorities Across Presidential Administrations 2000–2025

This working paper clarifies commonly conflated measures of immigration enforcement—“removals,” “returns,” interior versus border enforcement—and explains how shifts in policy priorities alter those measures over time. We outline definitions used in official yearbooks and examine how administrative choices (prosecutorial discretion, detainer policies, expedited removal, and resource allocation) affect headline counts. The aim is not to adjudicate competing claims about which administration removed more people, but to standardize concepts so public debate rests on comparable metrics. We conclude with a template for year-by-year reporting and provide suggestions for enhancing data transparency and comparability.

• It compiles a definitions-first descriptive dataset from the DHS Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, using ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations annual removal statistics provisionally for FY2023–FY2024 while the OHSS series is pending consolidation.
• It defines a removal as a mandatory movement recorded under immigration law and a return as a confirmed departure without a removal order, then distinguishes interior enforcement from border enforcement and explains expedited removal as a limited process without a full hearing.
• It keeps Title 42 public-health expulsions from FY2020–FY2022 separate from the removals-and-returns time series so those pandemic-era events do not break comparability with earlier years; interior and border shares are left blank when a like-for-like historical split cannot be documented.
• It provides a tidy CSV, codebook, and table footnotes for reproducibility. The transformations are limited to category alignment and percentage-share arithmetic; the paper does not use a predictive or causal model.
• It shows how prosecutorial discretion, detainer policies, expedited-removal scope, and resource allocation can change headline counts without proving a simple increase or decrease in total enforcement.

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