Millions have left the country

More than 3 million. That is how many illegal immigrants the Department of Homeland Security said in May 2026 had left the United States since President Trump returned to office. Nearly 900,000 were deported. About 2.2 million more, by the department's estimate, left on their own.

Any school secretary can tell you there are two ways to know how many students left over the summer. One is the stack of transfer forms, an exact count of every family that withdrew and signed the paperwork. The other is the roll call on the first day of school. Some families move without filing anything, and the office only learns they are gone when it counts the desks.

The forms

Deportations are the transfer forms; each one is a case with a name and a file. ICE logged 356,389 removals in fiscal 2026 through July 11, already more than the 319,980 it recorded in all of fiscal 2025.

Self-deportations are mostly the families who never file. A few do sign up. DHS's Project Homecoming program offers a plane ticket home and an exit stipend, now $2,600. About 132,000 people had left through it by mid-July, according to internal figures shared with Axios.

The math favors the voluntary path. DHS estimates each voluntary departure costs about $2,500 plus the stipend, while removing someone who refuses to go costs about $18,245. That's less than a third of the price.

The roll call

Here is the honest objection: the 2.2 million is an estimate, and DHS has not published its method. Economists at Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute dismissed a December 2025 DHS departure figure as a basis for estimating net migration, and they put 2025's enforcement-driven voluntary departures at 210,000 to 405,000. Anyone citing the DHS number should call it what it is: DHS's own estimate.

So skip the forms and take the roll call. Using the Census Bureau's monthly population survey, Jason Richwine and Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies estimate the illegal immigrant population fell from 15.8 million in January 2025 to about 13.5 million in July 2026. That's 2.3 million fewer, a drop of 14.6%, and the figure the White House now cites.

The removals I'm sure of; those are counted one case at a time. The exact size of the drop is shakier, since the estimate's own authors say reasonable choices could move their estimate by a million or two. Either way, the direction is not in doubt.

Paperwork can be argued over for years. The roll call is harder to argue with.