Did the United States deport 619 Thai citizens since President Donald Trump took office? No, that's not true: The figure refers to individuals waiting for final removal orders in November 2024, before Trump was sworn in as U.S. President for his second term on January 20, 2025. The number of removals since Trump took office hasn't been released.
The claim appeared in a video posted on TikTok on February 1, 2025 (archived here), which had the following on-screen caption, reading (translated from Thai into English by Lead Stories staff):
Oh!! Thai people have been deported!!
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Feb 13 13:36:27 2025 UTC)
The video features a screenshot of a document with a headline saying that Trump has ordered the deportation of 619 Thai citizens, for a total figure of more than a million people deported across all countries of origin. Other parts of the document are blurred, except the line that says Thailand and 619.
Lead Stories contacted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on February 6, 2025, for confirmation and the current figures. At the time of writing, the agency hadn't responded.
Lead Stories also reached out to the Royal Thai Embassy in Washington, D.C., on February 6, 2025, inquiring whether it has been in communication with the U.S. government regarding the deportation of Thai citizens.
The embassy hadn't responded to the inquiry at the time of writing. However, the Thai embassy's consular department posted on its Facebook page (archived here) shortly after Lead Stories' inquiry that "the data was not true."
"Because in the past, the Royal Thai Embassy and Consulate General have never been contacted by the relevant agencies of the United States to request the issuance of travel documents for Thai nationals to travel back to Thailand," adds the post.
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Feb 13 15:14:50 2025 UTC)
The number 619 refers to Thai citizens who were among more than 1,445,549 foreign nationals that were on ICE's non-detained docket with final orders of removal as of November 24, 2024. The document was exclusively obtained by Fox News (archived here), and was posted to its website on December 11, 2024 (archived here).
The document doesn't show how many people have been deported. Since the document referred to November 2024, it was still under former President Joe Biden's administration, not Trump's.
ICE and related agencies haven't released a specific number of Thai citizens removed since Trump took office. According to ICE's statistics (archived here), between October 2020 and September 2024, 95 Thai nationals were arrested, 97 detained, and 65 removed.
