Shortly before Christmas the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a report detailing deportations (henceforth “removals”) conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during fiscal year 2014. Below I present the data on removals in historical context – combined with information from the Migration Policy Institute and Pew. See my previous writings on this topic here and here.

ICE deported 102,224 unauthorized immigrants from the interior of the United States in 2014, down from a peak of 188,422 in 2011. Removals from the interior are distinct from removals of recent border crossers. Removals from the interior peaked during the Obama administration and have since fallen to a level equal to that of 2007.

Source: MPI and DHS.

The number ofinteriorremovals under the last six years of the Bush administration (the first two yearsare unavailable so far) was about 475,000. From 2009–2014, the Obama administration removed about 950,000 from theinteriorof the United States.

President Bush’s administration removed an average of about 276,000 unauthorized immigrants per year for the years available and an average of 79,000 of them annually wereinteriorremovals. President Obama’s administration has removed an average of 405,000 unauthorized immigrants a year, an average of 158,000 of them annually wereinteriorremovals. There were a large numbers of unknowns during the Bush administration that decreased as the years progressed.

Source: MPI and DHS.

The Obama administration’s recent decrease in the number of interior removals is not the whole story. The best way to measure the intensity of immigration enforcement is to look at the percentage of the unauthorized immigrant population removed in each year. Based on estimates of the total size of the unauthorized immigrant population, 0.89 percent of that population was removed from the interior of the United States in 2014 – down from 1.15 percent in 2013.

Source: MPI, Department of Homeland Security, Pew, Author’s Calculations.

For every year for which data was available, the Bush administration removed an average of 0.7 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population. President Obama’s administration has removed an average of 1.39 percent of theinteriorunauthorized immigrant population every year of his presidency – about twice the rate as under the Bush administration. Even when focusing oninteriorremovals, President Obama is still out-deporting President Bush based on the data available.

The unauthorized immigrant population increased under the Bush administration from 9.4 million in 2001 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007 and then declined to 11.7 million in 2008. During Obama’s administration, the number of unauthorized immigrants has, so far, stayed at or below 11.5 million.

Obama’sinteriorremoval statistics show a downward trend beginning in 2012 through to 2014. The Obama administration has also focused immigration enforcement on criminal offenders (not all unlawful immigrants are criminals) but the data is a little difficult to disentangle for 2014 so I left it out of this blog post – stay tuned for a future one on that topic.

The Obama administration has clearly not guttedinterior immigration enforcement as their 2014 figures for interior removals are higher than they were for every year of the Bush administration except for 2007 and 2008.