The Associated Press is reporting the results of an investigation of Department of Homeland Security data about deportations of undocumented immigrants. The bottom line number: there will be fewer deportations this year (edit) than there have been since 2007.
The Homeland Security Department is on pace to remove the fewest number of immigrants since 2007, according to an analysis of its data by The Associated Press.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for deportations, sent home 258,608 immigrants between the start of the budget year last Oct. 1 and July 28 this summer, a decrease of nearly 20 percent from the same period in 2013, when 320,167 people were removed.
Over 10 months in 2012, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 344,624 people, some 25 percent more than this year, according to federal figures obtained by the AP.
Follow me below the squiggle to learn why shouldn't take bottom-line numbers of deportations as your guide to President Obama's immigration policy.
We have been barraged for years with claims of record number of deportations under this President. This claim is based on the bottom-line numbers on the annual reports submitted by the DHS. What we don't hear about is that the method of calculating those numbers changed early in the Obama presidency, and enforcement actions that were formerly not included in the reports are now included. Specifically, the reports had previously distinguished between cases in which immigrants were caught in the act of crossing the border vs. the more familiar definition of "deportation" - kicking people who have been living in America out of the country. Now, both types of enforcement action are being counted towards the annual total.
Digging deeper into the numbers, it turns out that it is the former type of enforcement action - the number of people caught crossing the border and sent back - that has seen an increase since 2009. The roots of this increase go back to the Republican Congress of 2006, and its passage of the Secure Fence Act, which appropriated $1.2 billion for border enforcement measures, including drone aircraft and additional equipment and personnel for the Border Patrol. Actual deportations of foreign-born residents of the United States have declined under this President, as one would expect based on his executive orders on the subject.
Some have suggested that this change in accounting was made as a political maneuver, to produce the appearance of stepped-up enforcement activity while enforcement measures were actually being reduced. If so, this would be consistent with President Obama's maneuver in including large parts of the costs for the Afghan and Iraq wars into the Defense budget, rather than paying for them through special appropriations, and thus producing a higher bottom-line number for the Pentagon's spending, despite actually reducing its funding.
The bottom-line numbers in this latest immigration report bear equally close scrutiny. According to the AP, there are two factors driving this drop:
--The Obama administration decided as early as summer 2011 to focus its deportation efforts on criminal immigrants or those who posed a threat to national security or public safety. Many others who crossed into the United States illegally or overstayed their visas and could be subject to deportation are stuck in a federal immigration court system. Last month the backlog in that system exceeded 400,000 cases for the first time, according to court data analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. For each case, it now takes several years for a judge to issue a final order to leave the U.S.
--As Border Patrol agents detain more people from countries in Central America, not Mexico, the volume and circumstances of the cases take more time for overwhelmed immigration officials and courts to process because, among other reasons, the U.S. must fly such immigrants home rather than letting them walk back across the border into Mexico. A surge in the number of immigrant families, mostly women and young children, has swamped temporary holding facilities, leading the Homeland Security Department to release many people into the U.S. interior with instructions to report back to authorities later.
There are two important conclusions to draw from all of this. First, President Obama's handling of immigration as Chief Executive has helped to reduce deportations. Second, factors distinct from executive policy - the Great Recession, the border enforcement laws passed by previous Congresses, and the brief-but-dramatic spike in unaccompanied minors crossing the border last summer - have had a greater effect on deportation statistics than the policy actions of the President.