The count keeps climbing. A new report from the Migration Policy Institute puts deportations under the current administration at 980,000 over the first 18 months. NTD has the breakdown.

The number that jumps out at me: about two-thirds of those removals involved someone who had initially been allowed to stay in the country. Run the arithmetic on your own time, but that's the better part of a million people who came through the front door in some fashion, parole programs, asylum processing, temporary status of one kind or another. Then the status ended or was terminated, and they went from legally present to deportable. Catching someone crossing the line is one kind of enforcement. This is another. The paperwork caught up with people, and the system actually acted on it.

I spent 26 years in the Tucson sector, so I know how rare that used to be. For years the game was simple: get in, get a notice, disappear, wait out the administration. Interior removal was a low priority for a long time, and the overstay backlog grew accordingly. In my judgment, the previous crew let it rot. Now the receipts are coming due.

The two-thirds figure will get spun, of course. Watch the open-borders crowd call it "cruel family separation by another name" within 48 hours. MPI notes that many of those removed had temporary status, like humanitarian parole, which the administration has been ending. Fair enough. When parole authority gets used to wave people in, ending it means people go home. The paperwork was always temporary. Somebody should have told them.

Not everything in the report is a win. The same MPI data shows most of those removed had no criminal conviction, which the usual suspects will wave around like a get-out-of-jail card. Being in the country illegally is itself the offense on the table, and the courts back that up. But I don't inflate numbers and I don't pretend the composition is something it isn't. The count is the count.

And the count is 980,000. MPI did the math. The scoreboard doesn't lie.