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Given his rhetoric demonizing illegal immigrants and his promise to tackle mass deportations once he returns to the White House in January, deportations have actually declined in the four years that Donald Trump has been president. The meaning is shocking.
It’s also surprising that President Joe Biden’s administration is keeping pace with the Trump administration and deporting the same number of people.
There’s a lot of context missing from these pictures. Mr. Trump has spent his presidency focusing heavily on immigration, seeking to build a wall on the southern border and restricting travel to the United States from mostly Muslim countries, many of which are less well-received by the United States. It sent a deaf signal to Americans and the world.
President Trump also authorized immigration raids on businesses, something that the next “border czar” Tom Homan, a former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said he would do more of after Trump takes office in January. He said he was looking forward to it.
Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Homan said Trump 2.0 will be similar to his first term, but with more deportations.
“It’s going to be the same as it was during the first administration. With 10 million people in this country illegally under the Biden administration, that number will only increase tremendously,” Homan said.
During his first term, Trump also promised mass deportations. And in his four years in office, he deported more than 1.5 million people, according to Kathleen Bush Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
But this is about half of the 2.9 million deportations carried out during President Barack Obama’s first term, and less than the 1.9 million deported during President Obama’s second term. That’s the equivalent of Biden’s 1.49 million deportations, according to the latest calculations Bush-Joseph shared with me. These numbers do not include the millions of people who were turned away at the border under coronavirus-era policies enacted by President Trump and used for much of Biden’s term.
A lot of background is needed to explain these numbers. Bush-Joseph said Biden’s deportations focus on the border. Trump and Obama’s numbers also include expulsions from the interior.
While President Obama’s deportations focused on single men from Mexico, today’s illegal immigrants are more likely to travel to the United States in family units from long distances, she said. This complicates the process of repatriation, not only logistically, but also because many countries do not accept repatriation. Mexico has begun accepting shipments from other countries as part of an agreement with the Biden administration.
“The key context for any administration dealing with deportations is that the U.S. immigration system is extremely outdated, overwhelmed, and under-resourced,” Bush-Joseph said, adding that the U.S. already has a large number of deportations. He pointed out that there are 1.3 million people who have received notifications but are still being refused entry. Not expelled.
Another factor in the decline in deportations is that many local law enforcement agencies have stopped cooperating with federal immigration authorities, a change that President Obama’s It began during President Trump’s term and expanded further during Trump’s term. Cato Institute.
Bier’s research reveals that President Trump’s hard-line approach during his first term had unintended consequences.
For example, rather than prioritizing deportation of people with criminal records, President Trump has placed less emphasis on immigration measures against people deemed to pose a threat to public safety, and instead has focused on deporting people who are in the country illegally. By prioritizing measures against people, they widened the net. This led to President Trump’s controversial family separation policy.
Bier said the Trump administration filled detention centers with asylum seekers instead of focusing on detaining people who appeared to have criminal records, resulting in more people with criminal records entering the country. It is claimed that it has been decided to allow.
In a separate study, Professor Beer also looked at the increase in detentions of people who crossed the border illegally during Trump’s presidency and found that it did not substantially increase the number of deportations.
President Trump is certain to authorize high-profile raids, including the deportation of people with family members in the United States, but the system is currently stretched and President Trump’s actions will likely lead to deportations. It may not lead to a dramatic increase.
Creating a detention camp system to house some of the more than 11 million people President Trump wants to deport, not to mention the cost of detaining so many people while they spend time in detention centers The current total federal and state prison population would be smaller. court.
“The idea that we can quickly create the infrastructure to carry out the deportation of millions of people is just a pipe dream,” Beer told me.
John Sandweg, who served as acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, said on CNN last week that ICE currently has about 41,000 detention center beds. He said his main concern is that President Trump may try to find a way around an overwhelmed court system that deports people without a hearing.
Former ICE official warns of President Trump’s mass deportation plan
Sandweg said the vast majority of undocumented immigrants have never committed a crime in the United States, and the majority (he estimates 4.6 million) are mixed-status families with spouses and children who are citizens. insisted.
“When you turn it into a numbers game and say, ‘We’re going to reach a million people within a year,’ we’re not just talking about criminals,” Sandweg said. “There are less than a million criminals that get caught. You’re talking about families, and that’s the real concern here.”
