The Washington Post reports that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement played some number games in order to inflate the number of deportations this year in order to pass last year's number of 389,834, and also allowed immigrants in detention who had committed minor offenses and otherwise would have gone before a judge to return voluntarily and without affecting future attempts to travel to the U.S. or apply for legal residence. The Post writes "Without these efforts and the more than 25,000 deportations that came with them, the agency would not have topped last year's record level of 389,834," citing anonymous former and current ICE officials.
Some perspective is needed here -- it makes sense that the number of deportations would be lower than last year's given that the population of undocumented immigrants was in decline -- 8 percent since 2007, from a high of about 12 million to 11.1 million, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Subtracting the about 25,500 number, the Obama administration deported 363,734 people this year. That's more than 2008, when the Bush administration deported 358,886 people. The number of Obama administration deportations also represent a larger portion of the undocumented population, since in 2008, there were more undocumented immigrants in the country, period.
Obama's immigration record is another area in which conservatives have reflexively portrayed the administration's actions as a significant shift to the left relative to the prior administration, when in practice the opposite is true. Obama hasn't gotten nearly as close to passing a comprehensive immigration-reform bill as Bush did. He has thrown more money, personnel, and drones at the border than his predecessor, and so far, he has deported more unauthorized immigrants for every year he's been in office.
Yet the political pressure is so tremendous that ICE feels the need to inflate its own statistics. Rather than conclude that the Obama administration is "soft" on illegal immigration, this report is a reminder of the short-sightedness of hewing to the expectations of an enforcement-only immigration policy, where the goal is to get higher deportation numbers even as the population of undocumented immigrants is declining. The numbers will never be high enough for the administration's critics, or the border hawks who see the influx of immigrants as a "slow motion holocaust."
