Federal data on removals and backlogs is vanishing
Reporting shows the administration has stopped releasing key immigration numbers — removals, approvals, and backlog stats are being withheld, complicating timeline estimates for lawyers and clients reported. The blackout increases reliance on FOIA, litigation and local data to manage client expectations.
An Associated Press dispatch reported) on March 15, 2026 that federal agencies have curtailed routine publication of removals, approval rates and backlog breakdowns, leaving only intermittent headline figures. The Department of Homeland Security issued headline tallies — “more than 527,000” removals as of Oct. 27, 2025 announced) and a Dec. 10, 2025 release claiming about 605,000 deportations and “more than 2.5 million” people left the U.S. stated) — while underlying machine‑readable spreadsheets and disaggregated time series have been selectively omitted. The Deportation Data Project has been republishing individual‑level ICE enforcement files obtained under FOIA, noting its most recent public ICE data release covers enforcement through mid‑October 2025 documents) and flagging methodological errors in ICE’s June–July 2025 CSV releases that altered removal counts.(deportationdata.org) Coalitions of nonprofits and transparency groups have filed lawsuits demanding withheld records — Democracy Forward and the American Immigration Council joined FOIA litigation beginning Oct. 15, 2025 to compel ICE, CBP and EOIR disclosures litigated) and numerous FOIA repositories now post their requests and related filings for public use.(deportationdata.org) Independent trackers and researchers show divergent tallies: the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) continues to publish FOIA‑derived court and removal tallies maintains) while USCIS‑related reporting documented an 11.3 million‑case pending workload for the agency in November 2025, a figure publicized by analyst outlets and agency releases.(visaverge.com) Practitioner tools have shifted to FOIA‑sourced and third‑party repositories — the Deportation Data Project, Vera’s detention analysis and court‑level FOIA indexes now form the empirical backbone for timeline estimates and local‑office pacing because official approval‑rate tables and back‑end adjudication metrics are not being posted consistently.(deportationdata.org) DHS’s Office of Homeland Security Statistics still hosts monthly enforcement tables and ICE continues to operate an ERO dashboard, but analysts warn those releases contain exclusions and late revisions that undermine longitudinal comparisons, forcing reliance on mirrored FOIA dumps and independent dashboards to reconstruct trends.(ohss.dhs.gov)
