Over the course of President Barack Obama’s administration from 2009 to 2015 the federal government has removed over 2.5 million people. According to government statistics that is more than any other president in history (President George W. Bush came in second with just over 2 million) and the reason immigration groups like to refer to Obama as the “Deporter in Chief.”
Those immigration activists have staged protests across the country and are a big reason why the President has taken a hit with Hispanics. But it turns out those immigration statistics are not giving a true representation of what is behind the increase in the number of deportations:
A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data. Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.
Additionally, since President George W. Bush first instituted the change, most people caught trying to get into the U.S. illegally and sent home are no longer called “voluntary returns” – since then those people are included in the total number of reported deportations. What was politically expedient for President Bush has obviously hurt President Obama.
Now as President-elect Trump prepares to take office there are questions about how specifically he plans to hit his stated goal of deporting 1 to 3 million illegal workers and immigrants. In an August interview with Fox News on the campaign trail, Trump said that he would have similar approaches as Bush and Obama, but “with a lot more energy.”
Policy analysts on both sides of the aisle say the only way Trump can reach his goal is to return to policies from the second term of President George W. Bush, when his administration conducted immigration roundups at workplaces targeting illegal immigrant workers. The infamous work site raids in Bush’s second term only increased after his efforts at an immigration fix failed in the summer of 2007.
The tragedy of the work site raid policy is that immigrant families, not drug traffickers or criminals, end up in the crosshairs. An analysis looked at work site raids and came to the conclusion that a majority of the children affected by the arrest and deportation of their working parents were infants, toddlers or preschoolers born in the United States. A previous ICE director under Obama says that immigrants with families are “the low-hanging fruit in the system” since only “criminals hide”.
As the Obama administration enters its final days, some say the record deportations under his watch cement his immigration legacy, while others argue that he did his best under a Republican controlled Congress that refused to work on any immigration legislation. With a Trump administration making immigration enforcement a top priority, we are likely to have a President more deserving to be called the “Deporter in Chief”.
