Figures by nationality and historical perspective (the Red Scare, Japanese internment, “Operation Wetback,” NSEERS)
The wave of raids, detentions, and deportations of foreign nationals deemed criminals, unleashed by the second Trump administration, is not the first of its kind, but the fifth since 1919. We take stock based on available information and look back at the historical precedents.
Contents
1. The ICE/DHS Apparatus since January 2025
1.1 Arrests
1.2 Detention
1.3 Deportations (”removals”)
1.4 Releases
1.5 Breakdown by Nationality
1.6 The Case of Palestinians
2. Four Historical Precedents
2.1 The “Red Scare” (1919-1920)
2.2 The Internment of Japanese USAmericans (1942-1945)
2.3 “Operation Wetback” and Mexicans (1954)
2.4 Arabs and Muslims after September 11 (NSEERS, 2002-2003)
3. Comparative Synthesis
1. The ICE/DHS Apparatus since January 2025
1.1 Arrests
The pace of arrests picked up sharply from the summer of 2025 onward, after a meeting in which Stephen Miller criticized the directors of ICE[1]‘s local field offices for the slow pace of arrests and reportedly ordered them to go out and arrest “illegals.” This shift produced the first high-profile operations (Los Angeles, then Chicago, Portland, New Orleans, Charlotte, Minneapolis).
Between December 2025 and January 2026, ICE arrested an average of 1,264 people per day, an increase of more than 300% year over year, with a peak of more than 800 daily “at-large” arrests (in the open, outside the prison system) in December. Notably, two-thirds of these “at-large” arrests involved people with no criminal record, and only 17% had a prior criminal conviction — contradicting the official narrative of targeting “the worst criminals.”
Sources: American Immigration Council (blog, April 2026); TRAC Reports.
1.2 Detention
The detained population rose from around 38,000 people in early 2025 to more than 68,000 in early 2026, peaking at 70,766 people on January 24, 2026 — an all-time record since this data has existed. As of July 11, 2026, it stood at 65,765 people, 70.6% of whom had no criminal conviction whatsoever. A Cato Institute analysis puts the share of detainees with no conviction at 73%, and just 5% for those convicted of a violent crime.
Sources: TRAC Reports (Immigration Detention Quick Facts); LegalClarity; Austin Kocher/Substack.
1.3 Deportations (”removals”)
Official figures and TRAC’s figures diverge significantly depending on the definition used. According to TRAC, fiscal year 2025 (October 2024-September 2025) ended with 319,980 total deportations, compared to 248,739 in 2024, of which 234,211 are attributable to the Trump administration after it took office on January 20, 2025. DHS, for its part, reported a higher figure: 442,637 people deported over the same period, of whom about 167,000 (38%) had a criminal record — the discrepancy being explained by whether or not deportations carried out by CBP and so-called “voluntary” departures are included.
Over the first six months of fiscal year 2026, the pace accelerated further: 234,236 deportations between October 2025 and early April 2026, compared to 134,500 over the same period in 2025, which would put fiscal year 2026 on a trajectory exceeding 460,000 annual deportations — still far, however, from the administration’s stated target of one million per year.
Sources: TRAC Reports; Migration Policy Institute; Axios; Newsweek (DHS data, FY2027 budget).
1.4 Releases
The bail-release mechanism has been largely jammed since the summer of 2025. A series of BIA[2] rulings has restricted access to a bond hearing:
● Matter of Yajure-Hurtado, 29 I&N Dec. 216 (BIA 2025), decided September 5, 2025: the Board ruled that a person who entered without inspection (that is, without being checked at an official port of entry) and was never legally admitted must be treated as subject to mandatory detention as though a recent arrival, even after years of presence in the country — and therefore loses the right to a bond hearing before an immigration judge.
● Matter of Dobrotvorskii, 29 I&N Dec. 211 (BIA 2025): a companion decision spelling out how the existence of a “sponsor” must be factored into the assessment of a detainee’s flight risk — a factor now used to justify continued detention rather than release.
The cumulative effect of this case law, reinforced by a July 2025 DHS directive, is that long-term residents who crossed the border years earlier can be treated as though they had just arrived, and denied any bond hearing. The number of such hearings has collapsed as a result. Meanwhile, “alternatives to detention” (electronic ankle monitors, regular check-ins) were tracking 183,181 people as of July 11, 2026.
Sources: bklg.org (Immigration Bonds in the Second Trump Administration); Lehigh Valley Immigration Law; TRAC Reports.
1.5 Breakdown by Nationality
The list below brings together the available orders of magnitude by nationality; the figures come from disparate sources (ICE, TRAC, Deportation Data Project, academic studies) and are not strictly comparable with one another, but they give a coherent picture of the trends.
Mexico — ≈35–44% of arrests/detentions First nationality, in slight relative decline as flows diversify
Guatemala — ≈15–19% Second nationality, constant for years
Honduras — ≈10–14%; non-criminal detainees ×8.5 (700 → ≈6,000) Sharp rise 2024→2025
Venezuela — Non-criminal detainees ×14 (<400 → ≈5,600) Largest relative increase; removals under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to El Salvador
Ecuador — Non-criminal detainees ×2.5 (≈1,100 → ≈2,800)
China (PRC) — ≈30% of arrests of Asian nationals Arrests of Asian nationals ×3 between 2024 and 2025
India — ≈26% of arrests of Asian nationals
Vietnam — ≈15% of arrests of Asian nationals
Iran — 432 arrests in 2025; 577 detained as of 12/21/2025; 45 removed on 09/30/2025 Peak during the June 2025 war, with 220 arrests in June and 80 in July
Sources: Newsweek (map of arrests by nationality); TRAC Reports; UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (”Unseen,” January 2026); UCLA Asian American Studies Center (July 2025); National Iranian American Council; Middle East Eye; Time.
1.6 The Case of Palestinians
There is no aggregated statistic, strictly speaking, for “deportations of Palestinians” comparable to those available for Mexico, Venezuela, or Iran. This is due to an administrative reason: Palestine is not registered as an independent nationality category in ICE’s databases — the people concerned appear under other headings (third country of birth, Jordanian or Syrian travel document, or stateless status), which makes it impossible to count them as a national group from public data series.
What can be documented, on the other hand, is a targeted campaign against pro-Palestinian activism on campuses, distinct in its logic (political repression targeting opinions and mobilizations, independent of nationality) from the logic of mass action by country of origin described above. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reported, in late March 2025, at least 300 student visas revoked under this campaign; this figure fits within a larger total of more than 6,000 student visas revoked, announced by the State Department in August 2025, though the majority of these revocations were, according to clarifications from the administration itself, based on other grounds (unlawful status, criminal offenses) rather than pro-Palestinian activism alone.
The best-documented cases involve green-card holders rather than actual mass deportations: Mahmoud Khalil, born in Syria to a Palestinian family and a Columbia graduate, arrested on March 8, 2025, detained for 104 days in Louisiana before his release, under an immigration judge’s order for his deportation to Algeria or Syria (ruling suspended on appeal); Mohsen Mahdawi, born in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank and a permanent resident for ten years, arrested in April 2025 during a naturalization interview in Vermont, whose deportation proceedings were revived by the BIA after being initially blocked by an immigration judge. In both cases, the legal basis invoked by the administration is not nationality, but a provision allowing the deportation of a foreign national deemed to be undermining U.S. foreign policy.
Sources: Middle East Eye; The Intercept; NPR; Fox News; Gulf News (State Department, August 2025).
2. Four Historical Precedents
2.1 The “Red Scare” (1919-1920)
Contrary to an association sometimes made, Germans were not the target of this episode: anti-German hysteria belongs to a distinct and earlier sequence (1917-1918, during World War I), with no comparable mass-deportation mechanism. The “Palmer Raids” of 1919-1920 — named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer — targeted mainly Italians and Russians (often Eastern European Jews) suspected of anarchism or Bolshevism.
Between 3,000 and 10,000 people were arrested in raids carried out in early January 1920 in some thirty cities. The most emblematic case remains that of the Buford[3], which sailed from New York on December 21, 1919, with 249 people aboard, including the anarchist Emma Goldman, deported to Soviet Russia. The total number of actual deportations, however, remained limited — on the order of a few hundred to just over a thousand — far below the scale of the arrests, a gap often cited as a historical precedent for the disproportion observed today between arrests and deportations actually carried out.
General historical sources; research consulted on the Palmer Raids and the case of the Buford.
2.2 The Internment of Japanese USAmericans (1942-1945)
About 120,000 people of Japanese origin, nearly two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were forcibly interned under Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, without indictment or individualized judicial process. The major structural difference from the current situation is that this mainly involved USAmerican citizens as much as foreign nationals, and a mass internment on domestic soil rather than a deportation mechanism to a third country.
2.3 “Operation Wetback”[4] and Mexicans (1954)
This is the episode where the gap between official figures and historical estimates is best documented. Launched on June 17, 1954, under the Eisenhower administration and overseen by General Joseph Swing, then commissioner of the INS[5], the operation was presented at the time as having led to the deportation of 1.1 million people in 1954 alone, a figure long repeated — including recently in American public debate.
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández (UCLA), in in-depth research published in the Western Historical Quarterly, has shown, however, that the real number of deportations was likely closer to 300,000, the official figure having, in her view, served as propaganda to justify the cost of the operation and its quasi-military methods. Over a wider decade (the late 1940s to 1954, a period dubbed the “decade of the wetback”), the official cumulative total of departures and deportations linked to this policy reached about 2.1 million according to annual INS reports — a figure that mixes forced deportations with departures “under threat” of prosecution, and should therefore not be read as 2.1 million distinct physical deportations.
Sources: Kelly Lytle Hernández (Western Historical Quarterly, 2006); Britannica; History.com; FactCheck.org; Texas State Historical Association.
2.4 Arabs and Muslims after September 11 (NSEERS, 2002-2003)
NSEERS[6], put in place starting September 11, 2002, affected more than 90,000 people from mostly Arab or Muslim countries, thousands of whom were detained, questioned, or placed in deportation proceedings for failing to comply with the registration requirements.
Of that total, more than 13,000 people were placed in deportation proceedings for the sole reason of having voluntarily complied with the registration requirement — an example often cited of an immigration policy that punishes cooperation itself. Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities were among the hardest hit proportionally: about 1,480 people were actually deported to those countries, of whom 527 were on six flights chartered by ICE (already operational as of 2003) to Pakistan between June 2002 and October 2003.
Sources: Center for Constitutional Rights; American Immigration Council (Targets of Suspicion); NYCLU; Project on Middle East Political Science.
3. Comparative Synthesis
Three structural elements stand out when comparing the current period with these four precedents:
● The budgetary and logistical scale: ICE today has resources without historical precedent — a comparison more plausible with the stated ambition of “Operation Wetback” than with more limited episodes such as NSEERS or the Palmer Raids.
● The persistent gap between the official narrative (targeting “the worst criminals”) and the statistical reality (a majority of people with no criminal record) — a trait common to nearly all the episodes cited, including “Wetback” and NSEERS.
● The use of third countries to carry out deportations (El Salvador, South Sudan, transit through Guantánamo) is, by contrast, an innovation specific to the current period, with no direct equivalent in the historical precedents mentioned — with the partial exception of the Buford’s diversion to Finland rather than directly to Russia.
One methodological point, finally, runs through all four precedents as well as the current period: in each case, the official figure released at the time was later revised downward by historical research or by independent monitoring bodies (TRAC for the current period, Kelly Lytle Hernández for 1954) — a methodological caveat that also applies, as a precaution, to the 2025-2026 figures gathered in this document, which remain subject to revision.
Notes
[1]ICE — Immigration and Customs Enforcement: a federal DHS agency responsible since 2003 for enforcing immigration law within U.S. territory (arrests, detention, deportations). It is divided mainly into two operational directorates: ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations, responsible for arrests and deportations) and HSI (Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative branch).
[2]BIA — Board of Immigration Appeals: an administrative appellate body within the Department of Justice that rules, as a court of last resort, on decisions by immigration judges, before any possible appeal to a federal court.
[3]The Buford, nicknamed the “Soviet Ark” by the press of the time, was a former U.S. Army troop transport chartered by the U.S. government to deport to Soviet Russia 249 people considered foreign radicals, including the anarchist Emma Goldman. The ship left New York on December 21, 1919, bound for Finland, from where the deportees were transported by train to Russia.
[4]Wetback — literally referring to someone who crossed by wading or swimming, an English-language slur originally used for Mexican migrants who crossed the Rio Grande illegally by swimming to enter the United States. The term, attested as early as the 1920s, became commonplace in USAmerican administration and press through the 1950s — to the point of giving its name to the federal operation itself (“Operation Wetback,” 1954), which illustrates how normalized this racist vocabulary was at the time. The term is now considered an ethnic slur and is used only historically, in quotation marks, to refer to the operation’s proper name — never to describe people. Spanish equivalent: espalda mojada/mojado.
[5]INS — Immigration and Naturalization Service: a federal agency, then under the Department of Justice, responsible from 1933 to 2003 for all immigration functions (border control, naturalization, deportations). It was dissolved in March 2003, its functions distributed among three new DHS agencies created after September 11: USCIS (naturalization and residency), CBP (border control), and ICE (enforcement within U.S. territory, which today handles deportations).
[6]NSEERS — National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, also called “Special Registration.” A program created in 2002 by the INS and then administered by the newly created DHS, with two components: enhanced screening (fingerprinting, photographing, questioning) of nationals from certain countries upon arrival in the country, and a periodic reporting requirement (”call-in registration”) for men aged 16 to 45 already present in the United States on a non-immigrant visa and from 24-25 countries, almost all majority Arab or Muslim (plus North Korea). The “call-in” component was suspended in 2003 and the program formally closed in 2011, but its legal architecture remains available for reactivation.
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