It is all about how you count them:
It’s all in the counting.
As reported by ICE, the president has indeed deported illegal immigrants at a higher rate than any other president. A
new report, by the
Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, backs up the ICE’s claim.
- But according to Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan group that seeks lower immigration, ICE counts deportations differently than did past administrations, adding border crossers to its total.. This is why its numbers look bigger by historical comparison.
The counting switch, she explains, originated in a policy change in which the Border Patrol began handing over to ICE many of the people it had been immediately returning across the border. Now, after processing and penalizing them, ICE removes them from the country, often at a different location along the border.
The policy aims to separate illegal border crossers from dangerous smugglers who helped them. And by penalizing them, it aims to reduce the likelihood that they will cross again.
The numerical effect, though, is to include the Border Patrol “referrals” in the ICE count of “removals,” and thus both sets of government data are counted as deportations. In previous administrations, those caught at the border were not counted as deportations, Ms. Vaughan says.
To account for this difference, she counts the total number of illegal immigrants sent back as reported by all immigration-related agencies, starting with President Eisenhower.
What she finds is that the real deporter in chief was President Clinton, who sent an annual average of 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of the US. Obama ranks seventh, sending an average of 800,000 per year packing.
“Yes, on paper, the number of deportations did hit a record,” says Vaughan, speaking of the Obama administration. “But the types of cases counted to achieve that record changed dramatically.”
Not so fast, says Theresa Brown, an immigration expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Record keeping has changed over time, as have immigration policies, so getting an accurate picture of deportations over past decades is not really possible. “You can interpret these numbers based on your bias,” she says.
But both Vaughan and Ms. Brown agree with this interpretation of ICE data: that enforcement under Obama has shifted to the border and away from the interior – the vast rest of the country beyond 100 miles of the border.
Interior removals have dropped by 40 percent over the past three years, according to the most recent ICE data, while nearly two-thirds of deportations are from the border area.