It's a little unclear to me what you are trying to do, but you should be able use "RETURNING". Here I am just returning the rows that were deleted:
CREATE TEMP TABLE foo(id int, description text);
INSERT INTO foo VALUES
(1, 'HELLO'),
(2, 'WORLD');
DELETE FROM foo returning *;
+----+-------------+
| id | description |
+----+-------------+
| 1 | HELLO |
| 2 | WORLD |
+----+-------------+
(2 rows)
Also, if you need them moved "into" a table (for example), you could do something like:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS foo;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS deleted_foo;
CREATE TEMP TABLE foo(id int, description text);
INSERT INTO foo VALUES
(1, 'HELLO'),
(2, 'WORLD');
CREATE TEMP TABLE deleted_foo(id int, description text);
WITH x AS (DELETE FROM foo RETURNING *)
INSERT INTO deleted_foo
SELECT * FROM x;
SELECT * FROM deleted_foo;
+----+-------------+
| id | description |
+----+-------------+
| 1 | HELLO |
| 2 | WORLD |
+----+-------------+
(2 rows)
Assuming that you are doing this from inside a plpgsql function, you could also use the ROW_COUNT variable. For example:
GET DIAGNOSTICS integer_var = ROW_COUNT;
This would give you the number of rows that were deleted.