White House credits 2025 mass deportations with lower housing costs, higher wages, more native employment, and crime declines

In this context, the White House is using “mass deportations” to describe the large‑scale removal campaign it began after Trump returned to office in January 2025, combining both formal removals and incentivized “self‑deportation.”

According to the Department of Homeland Security, by Oct. 27, 2025 more than 527,000 people had been formally deported in 2025 and DHS said it was on pace to reach about 600,000 deportations by the end of Trump’s first year back in office. The same DHS release says that more than 2 million people had left the U.S. in total, including about 1.6 million who had “voluntarily self‑deported” via programs like the CBP Home app. Those DHS figures are what underpin the White House’s “mass deportations” language for roughly the January–December 2025 period.

The deportations and related enforcement described as “mass deportations” were carried out primarily by components of the Department of Homeland Security:

• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – especially Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which arrests, detains, and removes people from inside the U.S.; DHS repeatedly credits ICE with “record‑breaking” removals in 2025.
• U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) – including Border Patrol and the CBP Home app, which DHS used to push people to “self‑deport” and leave the country voluntarily with cash stipends and flights.
• DHS statements also frame these efforts as coordinated across DHS, ICE, and CBP under Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

The article itself does not name its underlying datasets, but the claims line up with these primary sources:

• Employment and wages: The White House jobs article it draws from (“Private Sector Job Growth Fuels President Trump’s Economy”) explicitly bases its numbers for native‑born and foreign‑born employment changes in 2025 on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Current Population Survey (CPS), which is BLS’s main monthly household labor‑force survey. Independent fact‑checks of the same talking point also trace it to non‑seasonally‑adjusted CPS tables by nativity.
• Wages (4.2% real‑wage growth): That claim in the December 2025 White House jobs article is described as “real wages” for American workers and is also tied to BLS wage and inflation data (CPS earnings plus CPI), even though the White House does not spell out the exact series.
• Crime statistics: The article’s statement that 2025 saw the largest single‑year drop in murders on record echoes analyses by crime‑data expert Jeff Asher using the Real‑Time Crime Index (RTCI) and preliminary FBI data, which estimate a ~20% fall in murders in 2025 and describe it as the biggest drop in the modern data era.
• City‑level crime (Washington, Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans): These examples are based on local police department statistics (e.g., Chicago Police Department homicide totals, Memphis and New Orleans crime dashboards) that were also summarized in national coverage of the 2025 crime decline.
• Housing prices: The White House only refers to “home list prices” by metro and does not name the vendor, but the phrasing matches list‑price series produced by large listing platforms like Realtor.com or Zillow. Outside fact‑checking of similar Trump/Vance claims notes that these housing figures come from private listing‑platform data, not from a government statistical agency.

The White House does not provide a full technical description in the article, but what is known about the figures it cites:

• The native‑born vs. foreign‑born employment and labor‑force counts come from the BLS Current Population Survey (CPS). Those tables are typically presented in non‑seasonally‑adjusted levels by nativity over time, meaning they do not adjust for regular seasonal hiring patterns.
• Because they are head‑counts from the CPS, they inherently reflect population changes (e.g., due to migration) as well as changes in employment status, but the White House does not separately adjust for those demographic shifts or other confounders (like age mix, education, or industry).
• The 4.2% “real wage” increase cited by the White House is presented as an administration calculation using BLS wage and inflation data; the White House doesn’t say whether this is seasonally adjusted or how it handles compositional changes in who is working. Independent economists have noted that these headline White House nativity comparisons rely heavily on non‑seasonally‑adjusted CPS data and are sensitive to how you choose start and end months.

So, while the underlying BLS data sets do have both adjusted and unadjusted series, the specific numbers the White House highlights are not clearly adjusted for seasonality or other confounding factors in any transparent way.

In the BLS labor‑force and employment statistics the White House is using, the terms are defined as follows:

• Foreign‑born workers: “Persons residing in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth.” This category includes lawfully admitted immigrants (naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents), refugees and asylees, temporary residents (such as students and temporary workers), and people in the country without authorization.
• Native‑born workers: “Persons born in the United States or U.S. Island Areas, or born abroad to U.S. citizen parents.”

These are standard BLS CPS nativity definitions and are what underlie the native‑born vs. foreign‑born employment comparisons referenced by the White House.

The White House article does not define “sanctuary cities,” but in U.S. immigration policy the term generally refers to cities (or other local jurisdictions) that limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Typical sanctuary policies:

• restrict local police or jails from honoring certain ICE detainer requests or from holding people longer solely for civil immigration purposes;
• limit when local officers may ask about immigration status or share that information with federal authorities; and
• bar local agencies from entering into specific federal immigration‑enforcement agreements.

DHS under Trump in 2025 used “sanctuary jurisdictions” in exactly this sense—jurisdictions that “defy federal immigration law” by declining full cooperation with ICE. That is the prevailing definition the administration appears to be invoking when contrasting price declines elsewhere with “sanctuary cities.”

No strong causal evidence is presented in the article itself that the 2025 crime reductions were caused by mass deportations. What we can say from available data is:

• Independent crime analysts (e.g., Jeff Asher using the Real‑Time Crime Index and preliminary FBI data) do find that murders fell about 20% nationally in 2025, likely the largest one‑year drop on record, and that other categories of violent and property crime also declined.
• City‑level data from places the White House mentions (Chicago, Washington, New Orleans, Memphis) confirm sharp drops in homicides and some other crimes in 2024–2025, but in most of these cities the downward trend began before Trump’s 2025 deportation surge and also coincides with local policing changes, targeted anti‑violence programs, and broader post‑pandemic normalization.
• Analyses of the 2024–2025 U.S. crime decline from outlets such as ABC News, Axios, and crime researchers attribute it to a mix of factors (cooling of the COVID‑era homicide spike, changes in drug markets, focused policing, community programs, and demographics). None identify mass deportations as a proven principal driver, and there is no widely accepted empirical study isolating deportation as the key cause of the national or city‑level declines.

So, while the crime drops are real, the direct link the White House asserts between deportations and lower crime is not established by the available evidence and remains at best a correlation rather than a demonstrated causal relationship.

The administration’s 2025 expansion of deportations rested on a combination of existing immigration statutes and new executive and legislative actions:

• Immigration and Nationality Act (INA): Core deportation authority comes from long‑standing INA provisions allowing removal of non‑citizens who are unlawfully present or otherwise removable (e.g., certain criminal grounds). These sections are what ICE and CBP enforce in any administration.
• Executive Order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” (Jan. 20, 2025): This Trump order directs the federal government to “faithfully execute” immigration laws, sharply expand enforcement, and treat large‑scale unauthorized migration as an “invasion,” providing policy direction for ramped‑up arrests, detention, and expedited removals.
• Executive Order “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders” (Feb. 19, 2025): While focused on cutting access to public benefits for people without lawful status, this order also instructs agencies to reduce incentives for illegal immigration and complements the enforcement push.
• One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed July 4, 2025: This omnibus law injects tens of billions of dollars into immigration enforcement. White House and House Judiciary descriptions highlight that it:
  • funds at least 1 million annual removals;
  • authorizes hiring 10,000 new ICE personnel; and
  • provides detention capacity for an average daily population of at least 100,000 people.
  The White House explicitly says this bill “will empower ICE to deport the millions of illegal immigrants” and allows ICE to “ramp up mass deportation operations to a level never before seen.”

These authorities together—existing INA removal powers plus Trump’s 2025 executive orders and the new OBBBA funding and mandates—form the legal and policy framework the administration used to expand deportations in 2025.