When it Comes to Deportations, Trump Can’t Hold a Candle to Obama

Both the corporate media and Donald Trump, himself, want you to believe that Trump is the “worst thing ever to happen to undocumented people.” There is no question that Trump aspires to be the Great Deporter, but “Barack Obama is damn near unbeatable when it comes to kicking people out of the country. Trump is not yet even a contender.”

“Obama’s rate of “removal” of unwanted immigrants was in the stratosphere for six of his eight years in office.”

If all you know is what you read in the newspapers and see and hear on the rest of corporate media, then you have been given the impression that, in less than 100 days, Barack Obama was dethroned as the champion deporter of unwanted immigrants in the history of the United States. Donald Trump, for his own, race-baiting reasons, would also like you to believe the misleading headlines. But it’s not true, and the actual numbers tell us that Obama will likely remain the all-time Deporter-in-Chief. Although arrests of immigrants during the first 90 days of this year increased significantly over the same period of 2016, Obama’s last year in office, they still amounted to only one-third or less of the immigrant arrests during the peak Obama years of 2011 and 2012.

Just as the New York Times methodically distorts and, objectively, falsifies its coverage of Syria and foreign affairs in general, in order to stoke the fires of war, the paper last Saturday deliberately constructed a misleading picture of Trump’s record of deportations during his first three months in office. At the top of the story, in the first paragraph, the Times tells us that immigration and customs agents arrested a little more than 41,000 people between January 22nd and April 29, compared to about 30,000 during the same period in 2016. That’s a jump from about 10,000 arrests per month in Obama’s last year, to almost 14,000 monthly detentions during Trump’s first year. But you have to read three-quarters of the article to learn that Barack Obama was arresting more than twice as many immigrants as Trump -- 29,000 a month -- back in 2011, and you’d have to do your own research to learn that Obama arrested and deported even more people than that in his peak year, 2012. At the rate that Donald Trump is going, he will have to become far more aggressive if he ever wants to even come close to Obama’s immigrant arrest and removal record.

“Barack Obama was arresting more than twice as many immigrants as Trump -- 29,000 a month -- back in 2011.”

If you are looking at my report on-line, check out the graph at the top of the page. Obama’s rate of “removal” of unwanted immigrants was in the stratosphere for six of his eight years in office, before he started thinking about cleaning up his historical “legacy” as a phony progressive and a friend of immigrants.

The New York Times gets away with its blatant distortions of facts, in this case, because Donald Trump wants folks to believe that he is worst thing ever to happen to undocumented people. Trump’s immigrant-hating constituents want to believe that Obama coddled people without papers. Trump’s operatives at Homeland Security bragged that the “statistics reflect President Trump’s commitment to enforce our immigration laws fairly and across the board.” But actually, the statistics show that Barack Obama is damn near unbeatable when it comes to kicking people out of the country, and Trump is not yet even a contender.

Obama and Trump, for their own reasons, are both deeply invested in the same lie. The people that are most disserved by that lie, are the immigrants, who are led to believe that the Democrats are their friends. Which shows that Black Agenda Report was right, back in 2012, when we described Barack Obama as the “more effective evil.” He is more effective in his evil-doing partly because he has media whores like the New York Times to whitewash his sins away.

But you have to read three-quarters of the article to learn that Barack Obama was arresting more than twice as many immigrants as Trump -- 29,000 a month -- back in 2011, and you’d have to do your own research to learn that Obama arrested and deported even more people than that in his peak year, 2012. At the rate that Donald Trump is going, he will have to become far more aggressive if he ever wants to even come close to Obama’s immigrant arrest and removal record.

What a bald-face f'ing lie. Obama had the fewest deportations since Nixon. He changed the way deportations were recorded, counting those found at the border as deportations.

ICE Deportations Hit 10-Year Low

Since Obama took office, the groups opposed to immigration enforcement have relentlessly leaned on their allies in the administration to ease up on deportations. At the same time, aware of public and congressional expectations that the laws be enforced, the administration has tried to create the impression that enforcement has been robust under Obama. The administration and its allies frequently point out that more than two million removals have occurred since 2009, an accomplishment that they characterize as record-breaking.

But counting only removals as deportations presents a misleading picture of the level of enforcement. Removals are just one form of the deportation process that can be executed by any of the three DHS enforcement agencies (ICE, Border Patrol, and CBP officers at the port of entry). All three enforcement agencies also can process deportable aliens as a return (sometimes known as voluntary return), which is a lesser consequence. In general most border deportations are processed as returns and most interior deportations are processed as removals, but in recent years many more aliens apprehended at the border have been turned over to ICE for a brief period of detention and then removed in recent years, in a departure from the traditional "you catch 'em, you clean 'em" policies, where the arresting agency typically handles the deportation process. In addition, illegal border-crossers who have been removed previously, or who are prosecuted for smuggling or other crimes are turned over to ICE for processing. Under these scenarios, the Border Patrol will count the case as an apprehension, which is their marquee enforcement metric, and ICE will count the case as a deportation.

Under Obama, a much larger number of Border Patrol cases were transferred to ICE for processing than had been the case under prior administrations. In 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush administration, just over a third of deportations credited to ICE were border cases, and two-thirds were interior cases. In 2016, more than two-thirds of the deportation cases credited to ICE were border cases, and less than a third were interior cases.

Thus a comparison of removal numbers alone is not meaningful or sufficient to evaluate the relative deportation performance of the Obama administration. Focusing only on removal numbers produces an inflated picture of enforcement.

For a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison of enforcement from year to year, it is more appropriate to examine interior deportations and border deportations as separate and distinct types of enforcement. As noted above, the interior deportations have declined considerably since 2010. Neither the Border Patrol nor CBP publishes the total number of deportations executed, and many of the cases are transferred to ICE, so year-by-year comparisons of border deportations alone are impossible using open source statistics. However, it is possible to compare total deportations executed by all immigration agencies using figures on removals and returns that have been tracked by the immigration agency since 1892, and now appear in the Yearbook.

The Obama administration has completed a total of 5.3 million deportations, counting both interior and border cases. That is a little over half the number of deportations under the George W. Bush administration. The true record for deportations was set by the Clinton administration, which completed 12.3 million deportations.

As Table 1 shows, the Obama administration completed the lowest average annual number of deportations since the Nixon administration. Notably, the number of border-crossers (and probably the number of recidivists) is much less now than was the case under the Bush and Clinton administrations, and that is probably the main reason total deportations are lower; but the Obama administration simply could explain that, rather than try to artificially manufacture a record by cherry-picking one type of deportation to count.

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