According to new data, more than 271,000 migrants were deported from the United States in 2024. However, this represents only 9 percent of the 2.9 million migrants who arrived in the country this year.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saw its biggest tally of deportations the 2024 fiscal year since the Obama administration deported 316,000 undocumented migrants a decade ago, their annual report suggests. Of those deported, nearly 89,000 faced criminal charges or convictions, according to the New York Post portal.

But immigration also had its biggest surge in U.S. history under the Biden administration: for the first time in U.S. history, more immigrants arrived in a single year than during the so-called Ellis Island era.

Ellis Island is a small island at the entrance to New York Harbor, located at the mouth of the Hudson River. From 1892 to 1954, this island served as the busiest federal immigration inspection station. The record year of the Ellis Island era was 1907, when 1,004,756 immigrants arrived in the United States.

The latest figure, a 90-percent jump from deportation totals in 2023, also surpasses the highs of the Trump administration, where ICE reported 267,000 deportations in 2019.

The US began experiencing a massive surge in immigration starting in 2021, following the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Customs and Border Protection officers reporting nearly 2,3 million encounters in 2021, and then 3.3 million in 2022, which relapsed back to 2.3 million in 2023.

The total encounters swung back up to 2.9 million this year, with 2.1 million being from the southern border, where hundreds of thousands are expected to try to cross illegally in hopes of entering the U.S. before the start of President-elect Donald Trump’s term.