Deportation Numbers 2026: BLS Survey Shows Immigrant Jobs Up

Deportation numbers and the government's own jobs survey are telling two different stories, and both readings have been published in the past two months. The household survey shows foreign-born employment up 509,000 from a year earlier, while a microdata analysis of the same survey says about 1.3 million immigrant workers have left since January 2025. TradeFlock's angle is the reconciliation: most of the gap comes from what each number measures and from a mid-year change in how the survey is weighted, not from the deportation count itself.

What the New Deportation Count Shows

The Migration Policy Institute fact sheet by Marc Rosenblum, a former head of the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, estimates that the Department of Homeland Security completed about 980,000 deportations between Jan. 20, 2025, and July 31, 2026. MPI frames the pace in annual terms: an annualized 620,000 deportations in fiscal 2025 and a projected 660,000 in fiscal 2026. That is a 26% increase over the fiscal 2021 to 2024 average, MPI says, but well below the administration's target of 1 million deportations a year and the record 1.86 million in fiscal 2000.

The mix matters for the labor market. MPI finds that 69% of those deportations involved people intercepted at the border. The other 31%, about 300,000, were people first arrested inside the country, the group most likely to hold jobs here. Interior deportations averaged 8,000 a month in the first three months of the administration and 19,000 a month from May through July 2026.

MPI also estimates between 310,000 and 1.5 million "self-departures" by immigrants with at least one year of U.S. residence. DHS officials have claimed more than 3 million total departures.

Reading One: Foreign-Born Employment Rose

Table A-7 of the September 2026 Employment Situation, released Friday, Oct. 2, breaks the household survey out by nativity. The figures are not seasonally adjusted, so the comparison is September to September.

• Foreign-born employed: 31,253,000, up 509,000 from 30,744,000 in September 2025.
• Foreign-born labor force: 32,279,000, up 206,000.
• Foreign-born unemployment rate: 3.2%, down from 4.1%.
• Native-born employed: 132,185,000, down 965,000.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research ran the same comparison in its September jobs report analysis on Oct. 2, noting the foreign-born employment-population ratio was 0.4 percentage point higher than a year earlier while the native-born ratio fell 0.7 point.

Reading Two: Immigrant Workers Fell

The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration, used the same survey's microdata for a Sept. 3 report and reached the opposite conclusion. It found the total foreign-born population fell 2.9 million from January 2025 to July 2026, and that the number of immigrant workers fell by a little less than 1.3 million. CIS said only 44% of the decline was among workers, and it acknowledged that some of the drop could reflect immigrants declining to answer the survey, though it said it had no clear evidence of that.

Why Both Can Be True

The year-over-year comparison crosses a break. The September 2025 and September 2026 figures sit on opposite sides of the household survey's annual population-control update. BLS says the January 2026 adjustment used Census Vintage 2025 estimates that include "a decline in net international migration," and that it was delayed by the 2025 shutdown and implemented with February data on March 6. BLS applies the entire adjustment to January 2026 data rather than revising earlier months, and says the update "affects the comparability of estimates over time." So the 509,000 gain is not a clean measure of change.

The windows differ. CIS measures from January 2025, a period that includes the first months of the enforcement push. Table A-7's comparison starts in September 2025.

Levels are noisy. Economist Jed Kolko, writing in a September 2025 guide to immigration and the jobs report, advised extreme caution with foreign-born levels, saying they "should never be compared across calendar years," and recommended focusing on unemployment rates instead. CIS itself puts a margin of error of plus or minus 1.038 million on its July 2026 foreign-born population estimate.

Border cases were never counted. About two thirds of MPI's 980,000 deportations were people stopped at or near the border, most of whom never entered the survey's population of residents.

What It Means for the Labor Market

Taking Kolko's advice, the cleaner signal is the rate. The foreign-born unemployment rate fell to 3.2% in September from 4.1% a year earlier, below the 4.2% native-born rate. That points to a tight market for immigrant workers, whatever their number.

It has not shown up as broad wage pressure. CEPR reported that average wage growth slowed to 3.0% year over year in September. Kolko has also argued that the job growth needed to keep the labor market steady depends on how fast immigration is changing the labor force, which is why the uncertainty over these numbers matters for reading every monthly payroll figure.

For earlier TradeFlock coverage, see our report on the Senate deportation plan and our look at Kroger's 2026 corporate layoffs.

What to Watch Next

• The October jobs report. The next Employment Situation is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 6, and will update Table A-7. Month-to-month changes within 2026 avoid the population-control break.
• January 2027 population controls. The next annual update will show whether Census further lowers its immigration assumptions.
• DHS reporting. MPI notes DHS has not released detailed monthly enforcement reports since January 2025. Official counts would let outside estimates be checked.

The bottom line: the deportation numbers, the survey's year-over-year gain and the CIS decline measure different things over different windows, and the survey's levels are the weakest of the three.

Cover image: "US-Mexico frontier" by Alvaro qc, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.