Deportations of illegal immigrants has crashed 50 percent under President Obama, despite the administration having a list of some 2.8 million targeted for removal, according to Homeland Security statistics.
Known to the government are 1.9 million criminal aliens, whose information including fingerprints Homeland Security has. There are also a documented 940,000 who have been ordered removed but are still in the United States.
And, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, there could be millions more that are not documented but would be deported under President-elect Trump’s plan.
The Center’s Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies, said that the list of deportables does not “include all those who were kicked out of the country but returned; that figure is unknown. Nor does it include aliens who committed a crime but were never convicted (often because they jumped bail or were released by a sanctuary), or the many illegal-alien gang members who are on the streets in greater numbers, and who were formerly an arrest priority for ICE but are now largely left for local law enforcement to handle.”
All of that has led to the drop in deportations recently under Obama.
But, blogged Vaughan, because border officials are still fully funded, ramping up deportations as Trump has proposed should be swift:
In 2016, interior deportations are about one-fourth of what they were at the peak under Obama, and criminal deportations have declined by more than 50 percent. By every measure, ICE is now doing less enforcement with more resources than ever before. This means that it will be neither hard nor expensive to achieve a significant boost in enforcement and to make a big dent in the target of 2 to 3 million priority deportations, including those of the criminals.
The first step will be to let the career officers and agents of the immigration-enforcement agencies do their job and apply the law. One deportation officer has told me that currently one of the easiest ways to attract negative attention from a supervisor is to be caught putting someone into deportation proceedings who is not a violent felon but “just” a drunk driver or wife-beater.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
