According to a report that illustrates some of the financial and operational challenges that President-elect Donald Trump will face in fulfilling his promise of mass deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported more than 270,000 people to 192 countries in the past 12 months, the Associated Press reported, quoted by BTA.
ICE, the main government agency responsible for removing people in the country illegally, carried out 271,484 deportations in its fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, nearly double the 142,580 deportations during the same period a year earlier.
This is the highest number of deportations carried out by ICE since Since 2014, when the agency removed 315,943 people from the country. The highest it reached during Trump's first term in the White House was 267,258 in 2019.
Increased deportation flights, including on weekends, and simplified travel procedures for people sent to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador fueled the increase, the IRS said. The agency made its first major flight to China in six years, and planes also stopped in Albania, Angola, Egypt, Georgia, Ghana, Guinea, India, Mauritania, Romania, Senegal, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Mexico is the most common destination for deportees (87,298), followed by Guatemala (66,435) and Honduras (45,923).
Immigration in 2024 led to the fastest rate of growth in the U.S. population in 23 years, and the number of residents in the country exceeded 340 million, the Census Bureau reported, reported the Associated Press, quoted by BTA.
The 1% growth rate this year is the highest since 2001. since and stands in stark contrast to the record low of 0.2% set in 2021 at the height of pandemic travel restrictions in the United States.
Immigration this year increased by almost 2.8 million people, partly due to a new census method that adds people admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the country's population increase of 3.3 million. people between 2023 and 2024.
Births outnumbered deaths in the United States by nearly 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, an improvement from the historic low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.
Immigration has had a significant impact not only nationally but also in individual states, contributing to all of the growth in 16 states that would otherwise have lost population due to residents moving out of the country or because deaths outnumbered births, William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, said in an email.
"While some of this surge may be due to refugees and humanitarian migrants crossing the border in an unusual year, these data also show how immigration "It could be a significant contributor to population growth in a large part of the country that would otherwise be experiencing slow growth or decline," Frey said.
As it has been since the beginning of the decade, the South's population is growing faster than other regions of the U.S. in 2024, adding more new residents - 1.8 million people - than all other regions combined. Texas leads with 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia has the fastest growth rate in the country, at 2.2 percent.