Immigration & Deportation in America, 2026

In 2026 the United States turned 250, and to many Americans the country feels unrecognizable. We started with a simple question: who are we? America is a country of immigrants, so we looked to immigration for an answer.

Rather than study the past 250 years, we studied the past twenty-five. We mapped where people came from and where they settled, using the established paths to living in America, visas and green cards, alongside the closest measure of what actually happened: the Census Bureau’s count of net international migration.

Plotted over time, the numbers tell an unusual story. Through the 2010s the trends were stable. In 2020 the pandemic brought immigration almost to a stop. Then, instead of simply recovering, it surged. By 2024 net international migration reached 2.7 million, the highest of any year since 2001. The very next year it fell by more than half, and projections for 2026 include a severe decline and potentially negative immigration.

The steep decline in immigration correlates with an increase in ICE detentions and deportations. This relationship led us to create a parallel map of ICE and Customs and Border Protection activity and the growing number of people held in ICE detention to explore relationships in these opposing data sets.

Reviewing the maps reveals interesting contradictions and correlations. Just as a handful of US cities receive a majority of immigrants, a relatively small number of countries receive a majority of deportations. These concentrations of inflow and outflow, lead to resource strain and reactionary politics. For example, the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas has a population of 29,000, but during elevated periods of immigration may receive thousands of incoming immigrants.

Just as a handful of US states receive migrants from a wide range of nations, A handful of states receive most new arrivals, and governments respond with reactionary policies. Immigration is a measure of American identity. Once stable, it has become erratic, and the speed of that change may be part of why the country feels unfamiliar to its own people. An inverted version of this problem appears in the deportation data: deportations are not evenly distributed or aligned with country of origin, and in some cases immigrants are being deported to countries to which they have no connection.

These misalignments within the immigration and migration system can lead to humanitarian crises with real, human costs. Students pulled into unmarked vans by masked police, potentially dangerous clashes between federal and municipal police agencies, refugees returned to the dangers they fled, and hidden human rights violations in a growing network of prison camps. As a country of immigrants, these crises challenge our shared sense of identity, raising the questions: who are we, how do we relate to one another, and what does it mean to be an American?

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