President Trump kicked off his second term vowing to deport a record number of people from the U.S. But deportation — a cumbersome process generally involving an arrest, detention, a removal order from a judge and finally a flight out of the U.S. — can take months or years.
"Each of those pieces can be extremely difficult and complicated depending on where someone is, who they are, what types of protection claims they might have, what types of resources the U.S. government has," said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, lawyer and policy analyst with the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
Much like his predecessors, Trump has taken steps to change how law enforcement officials track, find, detain and remove those in the country without legal status. He's also broadened the categories of people eligible for deportation.
"The sands are shifting underneath our feet," said Eric Welsh, partner at Reeves Immigration Law Group in Los Angeles, which represents individuals and businesses on issues related to immigration status and visas.
NPR spoke to immigration experts and lawyers and reviewed government documents to break down the steps of the U.S. deportation process and its cost. This is meant as a general breakdown of the process and not a rule for each individual's circumstances.
Step 1: Identifying who is removable
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In March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement told reporters it had arrested 32,000 people since Trump took office.
Those at risk for arrest include people without legal status because they may have entered the country illegally, overstayed a work or student visa, or violated the terms of their green card, including by committing a crime.
But immigration law experts add that federal law officials do not have to prove someone committed a crime to deport them — as recent examples of revoked student visas show.
Trump's latest moves include ending programs that granted legal status to migrants from certain countries. The administration said it would not renew Haitians and Venezuelans' Temporary Protected Status, a program that grants citizens of certain countries permission to live and work in the U.S. The White House also said it would end a Biden-era humanitarian program that granted two-year permits to live and work in the U.S. to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who had fiscal sponsors in the United States.
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There is pending litigation that has paused plans to end the protections, but if they lapse, once-eligible people who remain in the U.S. would be in the country without legal status and thus eligible for deportation.
Former President Joe Biden had a focus on border-region enforcement as the number of border encounters increased during his tenure. This second Trump administration has seen a low in border encounters compared to last year and has pivoted its enforcement to the interior of the country.
Step 2: Arrests
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Since taking office, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have tapped law enforcement in other federal agencies to assist with arrests to meet an aggressive quota pushed by Trump's officials.
In January, ICE officers were assigned a quota of 75 arrests per day for each of the 20 field offices.
The FBI, U.S. Marshals Service and Drug Enforcement Administration are now assisting in investigations and arrests. But those "at-large arrests" — done directly by federal agents — have constituted a minority of all ICE arrests in most years, according to the Migration Policy Institute; they were just 29% of all arrests in fiscal year 2024. Typically, most arrests come from local law enforcement.
Often, that involves the Criminal Alien Program, which takes people who are in local jails and prisons and transfers them to ICE custody, and a provision known as 287(g), which allows local police and jails to conduct limited immigration law enforcement.
Immigration detention can come at any point from arrest to a final decision in court. The cost can range and DHS also uses government contracts with private prison operators to expand available space. One recent contract is estimated to generate $180 million in annual revenue for CoreCivic. Alternatives to detention, such as ankle monitors and regular check-ins with ICE, can also be used.
Immigration lawyers explain that sometimes immigrants may ignore a notice to appear, or miss the notice altogether due to filing glitches. But a failure to appear results in a final order of removal.
Trump has also sought to skip the court process, relying on programs like "expedited removal," which allows anyone in the country for under two years without legal status to be deported quickly, and the "Alien Enemies Act," which the government has claimed allows it to deport people it deems members of Venezuelan gangs without due process, an assertion under intense legal scrutiny in federal courts.
Step 3: Immigration court system
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Immigration law decisions, including whether someone gets a final removal order, fall under the Executive Office for Immigration Review within the Justice Department. That office had more than 4 million pending cases in the last quarter of 2024.
"People referred to the immigration courts might end up waiting years before they have a hearing determining their case," said Bush-Joseph, from the Migration Policy Institute. "And when someone files for asylum, those cases can actually take even longer because of the complex nature of the claims."
If a person is found to be removable by a judge, a judge may find them "removable as charged," which is not a final order of removal but kicks off the rest of the process. The person does not lose their status at this point, if they have it.
"It's just like any other form of litigation. You can say 'I deny that' and the government has to prove that you are removable," said John Conrace, an immigration attorney in Mississippi. "People who get orders of removal, those are often generated because they are afraid to go to their initial hearing."
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If they appear in court, people have the right to ask for time to seek legal representation, though most people don't have lawyers.
Immigration lawyers say they often look for two numbers to prepare for the next step: if the person has been here for less than one year or more than 10. Less than one year allows a person to potentially claim asylum. More than 10 can stave off final removal if people can prove there is a relative who will suffer extreme hardship if the person is deported, or if they have a U.S. citizen spouse or children. But this is hard to win — and never grants a pathway to legal status.
Those in the country between one and 10 years can try to withhold removal based on other claims, such as risk of persecution or humanitarian relief.
The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a good example: the El Salvador immigrant was able to stave off deportation by arguing, in part, that it was more likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador. The government later said it deported him by mistake, prompting a lawsuit and a judge's order to bring him back.
Step 4: Removal
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If people's claims to stave off deportation fail, the judge issues a final order of removal. That's also appealable. People can also choose to "voluntarily depart," which is not a formal deportation and does not reflect on a person's future immigration record.
Appeals of removal are filed with the DOJ's Board of Immigration Appeals and could reach circuit courts and then the Supreme Court.
"That takes a wildly varied amount of time. If you are not detained and you are free, it could be years before the BIA gets to resolving the issue that was appealed," Conrace said, adding that it is not common for cases to make it up to the highest court.
In fiscal year 2024, immigration courts issued 666,177 initial case decisions, with a plurality being removal orders.
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As of the last quarter of 2024, there were 1.5 million pending asylum cases in immigration court and 1 million with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
"The current pace of work means that it would take a lot more resources, a lot more immigration judges and asylum officers, to be trying to work through these applications at a faster pace than is currently happening," Bush-Joseph said.
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About 1.4 million people have pending deportation orders, according to ICE, but there are challenges to sending many back to their home countries. One reason is that their home countries have not agreed to accept them.
The Biden administration carried out deportations to 192 countries in the last fiscal year — nearly every country in the world. The Trump administration is aiming to make inroads with others to be "third-party countries" that can take in deportees.
Estimates on total cost to deport one person vary depending on where someone is apprehended, how long they are in detention and the length of their legal battle. DHS' budget for ICE is $8 billion, the Customs and Border Protection budget is $20 billion and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services budget, which is covered by the fees people pay to apply for citizenship and other benefits, is $865 million. Not all this money goes to immigration law enforcement.
"Overall, the U.S. immigration system remains extremely overwhelmed, under-resourced and outdated," Bush-Joseph said. "It's going to take congressional action to really update and reform the system and bring it into the 21st century to meet modern migration challenges."
That reform, though, has proved a challenge — decades of reform efforts have died in Congress. A promising bipartisan effort came together early last year after months of careful negotiation, but fell apart less than a day after it was made public — as then-candidate Trump pressured Republicans to oppose the deal in order to keep border security alive as an issue in the presidential election.
Now, the administration is hoping that Congress can provide $175 billion for border security in the budget reconciliation process later this year.
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