Trump has removed "unusually high number of undocumented men who've lived here for years"

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The Trump administration’s vast deportation effort has led to the removal of an unusually high number of undocumented men who have lived and worked in the United States for years, according to a Washington Post analysis, upending the livelihoods and routines of scores of families.

Men account for nine out of every 10 people who have been deported by federal immigration officers since President Donald Trump began his second term last year. That ratio is not new: Women have historically represented a smaller share of those in detention, even as rising numbers of families have arrived in recent years.

But the characteristics of the men being taken into custody have changed, and the number of detainees has skyrocketed.

The Post’s analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows that almost a quarter of the 300,000 men removed since January 2025 had lived in the United States for at least three years. In the last year of the Biden administration, less than a 10th of all deported men had been in the country for that long before they were removed.

The share of those removed who have criminal convictions also has shifted significantly. Most of those deported in the decade before Trump took office again had been convicted of a crime. Now the reverse is true: Nearly two-thirds of the men removed since the start of the second Trump administration do not have criminal convictions.

Administration officials have said that the Department of Homeland Security is targeting criminals but will arrest anyone who is in the country illegally. A DHS spokesperson asserted that many of the detained immigrants who are listed as “non-criminals” have records in other countries. The agency provided five examples of recently arrested men who fit that profile but did not answer a follow-up question on how many detained men in total have criminal records abroad.

With the large number of men being removed, in many cases, women have been left to provide for their families on their own. In interviews with The Post, three women and one man described how an ICE arrest has transformed their families. All spoke of disastrous emotional and financial repercussions.

“It rips apart the fabric of the family,” said Regina Langhout, a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has published studies about the effects of deportation on families. “The material and psychological effects can be felt years and years later.”

For decades, single Mexican men comprised the majority of migrants entering the country illegally and being expelled across the border. But in the mid-2010s, soaring numbers of women and families began crossing and seeking asylum or overstaying visas. Recent studies indicate that nearly half of all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are female.

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