Thread: Trump right that Obama has deported millions

AP FACT CHECK: Trump right that Obama has deported millions

Originally published October 19, 2016 at 7:36 pm
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — A claim from the final presidential debate and how it stacks up with the facts:

DONALD TRUMP: “President Obama has moved millions of people out … millions of people have been moved out of this country.”

THE FACTS: That’s true. Obama has overseen the deportation of more than 2.5 million immigrants since taking office in January 2009.

During Obama’s first term hundreds of thousands of immigrants were deported annually, following a trend of increasing deportations started under President George W. Bush. The administration set a record in 2014 when more than 409,000 people were sent home. During his second term, deportations have steadily declined as he has opted to focus immigration enforcement resources on finding and deporting serious criminals and those who pose a threat to national security or public safety.

But Trump also claims that “nobody knows about it, nobody talks about it” and that’s far from the truth. Obama has been dubbed “the deporter in chief” by immigration advocates and opponents of his immigration enforcement policies.

http://www.seattletimes.com/business...rted-millions/

How many people has Obama really deported?


President Obama's deportation policies are criticized as flimsy by conservatives and draconian by immigrant advocates. His administration has carried out more removals than any other in US history.


By David Iaconangelo, Staff OCTOBER 20, 2016


Donald Trump is not the sort of candidate that often looks to precedent when defending his proposals. When he does, he sometimes lands on odd examples.

“President Obama has moved millions of people out,” said the Republican nominee on Wednesday night. “Nobody knows about it. Nobody talks about it. But under Obama, millions of people have been moved out of this country. They’ve been deported.”

To be sure, Mr. Trump has pledged to undo the tethers – fixed in place by directives from Mr. Obama – on whom immigration authorities can target for deportation, while promising to triple the number of agents. And the candidate is making enforcement a priority: the changes would take place, he has said, on “day one.”

But Trump was indeed correct when he pointed to the rate of deportations under Obama, which climbed to more than 2.5 million through 2014, the last year of government data and well beyond the total under George W. Bush’s presidency, when deportations first began to spike. If the rate has remained steady since then, says Marie Price, a geography and international affairs professor at George Washington University who studies migration, the total might have reached more than 3 million.

“It’s an inconvenient truth for Republicans and Democrats,” she tells The Christian Science Monitor. For Republicans who argue that little has been done to expel unauthorized immigrants, the figure proves that much has actually been done. For Democrats that prize the Latino vote, she says, “this is an embarrassment.”

That the meaning of the number is interpreted in such divergent ways, though, seems to point to how extensively elaborated distinct ideologies on immigration have become, after a decade and a half of Congressional failures to achieve bipartisan reform. And Obama’s failure to use stepped-up deportations as a means of boxing Republicans into a comprehensive reform could set the terms for future presidents.

“That clearly didn’t work for President Obama, and it caused a lot of grief among his allies,” says Faye Hipsman, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington D.C., think tank.

After bipartisan reforms dissolved, Obama turned to executive actions to make more limited, temporary and politically volatile changes, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in 2012 and its 2014 sister, DAPA, which a Republican-led legal challenge later blocked.

As The Christian Science Monitor’s Warren Richey wrote in 2014, Obama isn’t the first president to use executive authority to defer immigration enforcement against certain non-citizens – John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and both Bushes did so, too.

“But unlike Obama,” the Monitor wrote, “each of those presidents was acting with the support of Congress rather than in defiance of congressional leaders.”

Those actions may have laid the groundwork for future executive actions; for many undocumented immigrants, much could hinge on whether the next president wants to revoke previous directives. But two Obama-authored changes in deportation policy, denounced as draconian by immigrant advocates, seem unlikely to fade away.

One is a change in how immigration authorities operate along the border, says Rene Rocha, a political scientist at the University of Iowa and leading expert on the policy and politics of immigration.

Immigration authorities, he tells the Monitor, started placing more formal removal orders against unauthorized immigrants apprehended near the border. That meant that more people would likely make an appearance before a legal entity, rather than pressing them to sign “voluntary return” forms by which they agreed to leave the country of their own accord.

That artificially inflates the number, says Dr. Rocha. “It’s not necessarily that more people were being kicked out the country.”

The other difference was the implementation of Secure Communities, a program that allowed ICE to coordinate with local police whenever someone without documentation ended up in jail, leading to a huge increase in apprehensions in the country’s interior.

Secure Communities has since been replaced by another initiative known as the Priority Enforcement Program, which allows local authorities to opt out, though the idea is effectively the same.

“Prior to the Obama administration, there was very little interior enforcement, it was almost all near the border. By the end of 2011, arrests near the border and interior were equal," says Dr. Rocha.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politic...eally-deported

Obama Administration Inflating Deportation Numbers

by ANDREW STILES February 10, 2014 6:00 PM @ANDREWSTILESNRO

Access Misleading classifications make it look like traditional deportations are up. They’re not.

Proponents of comprehensive immigration reform aren’t buying the Republican argument that President Obama simply can’t be trusted to secure the border or enforce new immigration laws.

The Washington Post editorial board called this suggestion “transparently false,” citing the “record” number of deportations under the Obama administration. Meanwhile, liberal activists have urged the president to halt all deportations of illegal immigrants via executive action.

But there is ample evidence to suggest the administration’s deportation record is severely inflated, or at the very least misrepresented.

Consider the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report on year-end removal numbers for fiscal year 2013. ICE reported a total of 368,644 removals for the year (down considerably from the 409,949 removals reported the previous year).

The ICE report noted that of those 368,644 removals, 235,093 (or nearly two-thirds) were carried out on individuals “apprehended while, or shortly after, attempting to illegally enter the United States.” This shows that while the Obama administration continues to deport illegal immigrants in large numbers, most of these removals do not constitute a “deportation” in the conventional sense.

Activists fighting to end deportations argue that, while the people being deported are here illegally, they’ve been living in the country for some time, often with relatives or children of their own — hence the charge that deportations “break up families.” Cases like these exist, but as the ICE data show, they are the minority. For the most part, the Obama administration is “deporting” people it catches in the act of entering the country illegally.

In fact, the Department of Homeland Security’s own guidelines distinguish between “removals” and “returns.” According to DHS, a removal is defined as “the compulsory and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States based on an order of removal.”

Returns, meanwhile, are defined as “the confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal. Most of the voluntary returns are of Mexican nationals who have been apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol and are returned to Mexico.” The primary difference between the two categories is that removals are processed by ICE, while returns are not.

In 2012, Representative Lamar Smith (R., Texas), then chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, discovered that the Obama administration was counting a certain number of “returns” as “removals.” Immigrants apprehended at the border are often times referred to ICE and subsequently processed as a removal. This has the effect of artificially inflated the number of removals, or deportations, by at least 50,000 per year. It is also a reason why what the administration refers to as “border apprehensions” are near historic lows: People are in fact being apprehended at the border, but their cases are grouped as removals in the statistical record.

Smith said in a statement at the time, following a committee review of internal ICE documents:

Since 2011, the Obama administration has included in its year-end deportation statistics the numbers from a Border Patrol program that returns illegal immigrants to Mexico right after they cross the border. It is dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals. And these “removals” from the Border Patrol program do not subject the illegal immigrant to any penalties or bars for returning to the U.S. This means a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year — and counted each time as a removal. When the numbers from this Border Patrol program are removed from this year’s deportation data, it shows that removals are actually down nearly 20 percent from 2009. Another 40,000 removals are also included in the final deportation count but it is unclear where these removals came from.

Immigration expert Jessica Vaughan made the same argument last year when she testified on behalf of ICE agents suing the Obama administration in federal court. Vaughan analyzed the administration’s enforcement statistics and found that the actual number of illegal-immigrant removals had dropped 40 percent since June 2011.

Chris Crane, president of the union representing more than 7,000 ICE agents and officers, has accused the Obama administration of “knowingly manipulating arrest and deportation data” to create a false impression of its enforcement record. “We just don’t see it in our offices,” he told National Review Online in April 2013. “Every year we supposedly break the record for deportation, and we can’t figure out what’s going on. We don’t believe these numbers.” — Andrew Stiles is a political reporter for National Review Online.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...-andrew-stiles