Letter: The deportation shell game

Reading the reports of huge new warehouses being bought for renovation for “millions” of illegal immigrants, I set out to discover how many have actually been deported since January 2025. Not millions: by the DHS’s own figures, there may have been 605,000 deported in 2025—but that may include encounters at the border in which people were turned away. The independent Deportation Data Project counts 305,000 deported. The DHS claims that 1.6M have “self-deported,” but the independent Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the true number is perhaps 160K—1/10th of that. Kaiser (and others) also report that only about 25% of the 74,000 in detention actually have criminal records. DHS has paid more than $1B for these empty warehouses—13% above market value according to real estate tracker CoStar. And Alligator Alcatraz is being shut down. This is a scam, people, and we are the victims.