U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 271,484 immigrants to nearly 200 countries last fiscal year, the highest tally in a decade, according to the agency’s annual report published Thursday.

Most deportees had crossed the U.S. southern border illegally, part of a record number of people fleeing authoritarian regimes, poverty and economic collapse in the Western Hemisphere after the pandemic. The ICE report covered enforcement operations from Oct. 1, 2023, to Sept. 30.

The report is ICE’s final accounting of immigration enforcement under the Biden administration before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20. Trump has promised to immediately launch the largest deportation campaign in American history, though he has offered few or conflicting details about how he would manage it. Staffing levels of immigration enforcement officers have been stagnant for years.

“Our agency is chronically underfunded, but our workforce is adaptable, resilient and agile, and they set the bar high within the federal government,” said ICE’s top official Patrick J. Lechleitner, in a statement. “ICE is an apolitical agency, and one thing I can tell you about our workforce is that they’re here to investigate crimes and enforce the laws Congress sets forth.”

Biden took office in 2021 pledging to pause deportations, and he sent Congress a bill that would have allowed most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country to get on paths to citizenship. But surging border crossings derailed his plans, and Biden officials ended up expanding rather than reducing detention and deportations.

Illegal border crossings have plunged since Biden implemented new rules last summer that sharply restrict asylum claims, resulting in far more migrants being deported than released into the United States with a pending court case.

Deportations by ICE during Trump’s first term peaked at 267,260 during the 2019 fiscal year, data show. Under Trump, deportees were more likely to be individuals arrested in the interior of the United States, rather than recent border-crossers.

Federal immigration officials said several factors drove the overall increase in Enforcement and Removal Operations during the past year, particularly to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which accepted more flights transporting those deported from the United States.

“These actions enhanced ERO’s ability to scale up removal operations and laid the groundwork for the increase of removals in FY 2024,” the report said.

ICE also expanded after “intensive diplomatic efforts” the number of charter flights last year to countries in the Eastern Hemisphere, including the first large removal flight to China since fiscal 2018.

Five hundred deportees were dispatched to China last year, down slightly from fiscal 2019.

Other flights went to Albania, India, Senegal, and Uzbekistan.

Records show Biden largely kept his promise to focus on immigrants who are a top priority for removal, including recent border crossers and people who posed a threat to national security or public safety.

Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States and immigration officials typically remove a tiny fraction of them each year, in part because of years-long backlogs in U.S. immigration courts, budget constraints, and public opposition to removals in many states.

The 2024 report shows that the highest numbers of immigrants removed from the United States went to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, in that order.

Those countries typically cooperate with deportations and their citizens are likely to be significant targets for removal under the Trump administration.

Venezuela, however, is less cooperative. People from that South American country are one of the largest groups on ICE’s deportation docket. But last year just 3,256 people were deported.

Trump and his surrogates have provided few details about how they would steer a dramatic expansion in enforcement. ICE has about 6,000 immigration enforcement officers, roughly the same staffing level that it had a decade ago, the report shows.

During that time, the number of people with pending immigration cases on ICE’s docket - individuals who are not detained but under ICE’s management -- has nearly quadrupled to about 8 million.

Trump also promised to aggressively increase deportations during his first term, but because of resistance from Democrat-led cities and states, he never surpassed the Obama administration’s record of more than 400,000 removals a year.

Former acting ICE Director Tom Homan, Trump’s pick to serve as “border czar,” has said the new administration will focus on deporting people who pose a threat to public safety and national security. Those groups are also the Biden administration’s top enforcement priorities.

Homan has also said immigrants who already have pending deportation orders - nearly 1.5 million - will also be a priority when Trump takes office. But internal ICE data show nearly half of those individuals aren’t eligible to be sent back because their countries won’t take them, they have received a reprieve from a judge, or due to another factor.

Homan said operations will differ in a significant way from Biden’s: Anyone in the United States illegally could be eligible for arrest and deportation.

Biden officials said in 2021 that simply being in the United States unlawfully would not be grounds for a deportation, directing ICE to focus more intensely on criminals. That meant most of the 11 million people were spared from enforcement.

Of the 271,484 immigrants ICE deported last year, about 33 percent had criminal records or pending criminal charges, according to the 2024 data. The majority of deportees were recent border-crossers transferred to ICE by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Traffic violations, drug offenses, immigration violations and assault are the top categories of criminal charges among those taken into ICE custody, the report shows.

Last year, ICE deported 411 unaccompanied minors who arrived without their parents, compared with more than 6,300 removals in 2019. Officials deported more than 49,000 migrant family members last year, up from nearly 18,000 the prior year.

Biden and his supporters argued that undocumented immigrants are essential workers and cherished neighbors, and he urged Congress to pass a bill that would have granted them a path to citizenship. That measure fizzled as illegal border crossings surged to an average of 2 million a year.

Officials soon pivoted to increased enforcement, but widespread public disapproval of Biden’s policies dogged the administration and Trump again seized on the issue to criticize Democrats on the campaign trail.

Trump will soon face his own challenges as he tries once more to implement his promises. He is likely to encounter fresh opposition to his deportation plans from states such as California and Illinois, where political leaders and voters oppose uprooting longtime immigrants who work, own their houses, and have U.S. citizen children.

To expand deportations, Trump also will need assistance from prisons and jails across the nation, where officials tend to arrest most immigrants in the interior, often after a traffic stop or a criminal arrest.

States such as Texas, where many undocumented immigrants live, eagerly cooperate with ICE, while California, Illinois and other states have passed laws limiting cooperation with ICE, in part because they say immigrants are longtime residents working in jobs that Americans will not do.

The specter of splitting up immigrant families also looms large over immigration enforcement in the Trump administration.

Trump faced international condemnation when he forcibly separated migrant parents from their children at the U.S. southern border to deter illegal crossings. Many fear his interior enforcement will also split up families.

Trump and Homan, who helped led the border separation policy during Trump’s first term, have said families could stay together by leaving the country together.