Hardcore supporters of President Donald Trump who are enamored with his anti-immigrant policies are less in love with the numbers coming out of the Department of Homeland Security.
When they can get them.
Trump’s base is turning on the administration over what they view as deliberately inflated deportation claims and a failure to deliver on campaign promises. The crack in the MAGA coalition is widening as immigration hardliners realize they’ve been played, The Dispatch is reporting.
The problem is transparency. According to the report, DHS has stopped releasing the underlying data that would back up its press release deportation claims.
“Since January 2025, the Trump administration has stopped releasing data tables from the DHS statistics office that break down how many people have been removed from the country, under what circumstances, and by which enforcement agency. Other agency-specific data sources have also not been updated since Trump took office, including the ICE statistics portal, which was previously updated quarterly,” Grayson Logue of The Dispatch reported.
The silence has fueled suspicions.
Mark Morgan, a former CBP and ICE official from Trump’s first term, is now openly accusing the administration of deception. “I’m confused, I’m frustrated, and quite frankly, I’m angry because I believe we’re being intentionally misled,” Morgan said this week. He’s part of the Oversight Project, an activist group that recently sued the administration to force release of enforcement data.
DHS touts deportation figures like 356,000 or 400,000, but immigration researchers “struggle to verify these numbers using available data.” When activists break down the figures, they discover the numbers include exits, returns, and other removals that don’t constitute interior deportations—the mass deportation campaign Trump promised.
MAGA media personalities are now expressing buyer’s remorse. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren dedicated a recent podcast to attacking DHS for “fudging the numbers” and delivering underwhelming results.
Rosemary Jenks, co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project, articulated MAGA’s feelings during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s podcast: “I think the numbers aren’t as good as they want them to be. That’s really the only conclusion we can get to.”
“We just gave billions and billions of dollars to ICE, and we’re happy for that, we supported that, and we want to cheerlead for ICE and for the Trump administration, but we need the numbers in order to do that,” she complained.
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