The Department of Homeland Security has used administrative subpoenas 185,000 times since Trump took office. That figure covers the department as a whole, not any single agency inside it.
A second number comes from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the DHS arm that runs criminal investigations. HSI estimates it has sent more administrative subpoenas since January 2025 than it did in the more than six and a half years from 2016 to mid-August 2022. That is an HSI-only comparison, and it is an estimate. It measures something different from the 185,000, so the two should not be added together or read as one series.
An administrative subpoena is a demand for records that an agency issues on its own authority, without a judge signing off first. That is why counts like these matter. Courts are not a built-in checkpoint for this tool, so the totals are one way for outsiders to see how often it is used.
The totals leave a lot unanswered: what the subpoenas sought, who received them, and how many were challenged or withdrawn.