how many illegal immigrants were deported during the obama administration

During Barack Obama’s presidency, immigration authorities formally deported roughly 3 million people, making his administration one of the most aggressive on record in terms of removals.

Key Numbers at a Glance

• From 2009 to 2015, the Obama administration deported more than 2.5 million people via formal removal orders.

• By the end of his eight years (2009–2017), estimates for total formal removals cluster around 2.7–3.1 million.

• These figures cover formal removals (people ordered removed by DHS/immigration courts), not those who self-deported or were simply turned back at the border.

Why the Numbers Look So High

Obama inherited and expanded an enforcement system that emphasized:

• Formal removals over “returns” (voluntary returns or turn-backs at the border), which increased the official deportation count.

• Heavy use of programs like Secure Communities , which linked local jails to federal immigration databases and funneled arrestees into deportation proceedings.

Because more cases were processed as formal removals rather than informal returns, the administration’s statistics look especially large compared with earlier presidents, even as total border crossings declined.

Who Was Most Often Deported

Over time, the focus shifted toward:

• Recent border crossers rather than people long-settled in the interior.

• People with criminal convictions or deemed security/public-safety risks , especially in the later years after 2014 enforcement-priority memos.

For example, by 2015 about 91 percent of people deported from inside the U.S. had prior criminal convictions, reflecting this prioritization strategy.

Context for Today’s Debates

These deportation figures are often cited in current debates to argue that:

• Obama was, in practice, a strict enforcer of immigration law, despite his pro-immigrant rhetoric, which led some advocates to call him the “Deporter in Chief.”

• At the same time, he introduced relief measures like DACA, so his record is viewed as mixed : both expansive enforcement and limited protections coexisted, fueling continuing political and forum discussions about how his numbers compare with later presidents.

TL;DR: If you’re asking “how many illegal immigrants were deported during the Obama administration?” the best-supported ballpark is about 3 million formal deportations over his eight years in office , with a particularly strong emphasis on recent border crossers and people with criminal records.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.