Officials from President Donald Trump’s administration this week touted increased immigration arrests, yet government statistics indicate deportations are failing to keep pace.
Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which gathers data through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, reported recently that deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in October had dropped by nearly half from 2012.
The decline, which continued during Trump’s first year in office, began during former President Barack Obama’s tenure. In October 2012, the monthly figure was 34,534. It dropped to 20,833 in December 2016 and declined again, hitting 18,428 in October 2017.
According to the figures gathered by TRAC, nearly half of the 156,071 people ICE deported from February through October last year had not been convicted of a crime.
ICE officials did not respond to a request from LifeZette for comment on the TRAC data.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said judging the Trump administration’s performance during its first nine months in office likely does not present the most accurate picture.
There is a lag between ICE arrests and when officials carry out deportations, she said. Many times, ICE will arrest illegal immigrants who have been charged with crimes. Officials wait for the end of those judicial proceedings and, in some cases, for the defendants to serve prison sentences.
“It has taken some time to revise the policies of the Obama administration,” she said. “It might be a different story in 2018.”
Experts said other factors work against deportations. Vaughan pointed out that Mexicans account for a smaller share of illegal immigrants than in previous years. Sending Mexicans back home is a simpler process than arranging for deportations to noncontiguous countries, she said.
“The other issue is since they’ve been in the country for a while, they try to delay their deportation by going to immigration court,” she said.
Matthew O’Brien, director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said there is no question that immigration courts have become more overburdened since the beginning of the Obama years.
“The immigration court system simply isn’t big enough,” he said. “Number two, the system is backlogged because of different legal factors.”
Immigration advocacy organizations have become more bold in challenging deportations, and illegal immigrants now have aid in the form of taxpayer-funded lawyers in some cities, O’Brien said.
“You have the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) getting attacked all over the place,” he said.
[lz_table title=”Declining Deportations” source=”Syracuse TRAC”]Deportations February-October
|Year,Deportations
2008,313.5K
2009,307.7K
2010,293.2K
2011,309.7K
2012,321K
2013,275.6K
2014,242.7K
2015,184.8K
2016,181.3K
2017,155.6K
[/lz_table]
Increasingly, O’Brien said, immigration lawyers pursue meritless asylum claims that tie up court time. He recalled a group of Canadian drug dealers from Quebec Province nabbed by law enforcement authorities in upstate New York during George W. Bush’s administration.
Rather than accepting deportation, O’Brien said, the defendants claimed asylum on grounds that they would be tortured by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
“Dudley Do-Right isn’t torturing anyone,” he quipped. “It’s just an absurd claim.”
But the immigration judge went through the motions, wanting to create a record so that it would not be vulnerable to appeal, O’Brien said. At the time, he was assistant chief counsel with ICE helping on the case. He said the asylum claims added about 100 hours to his workload.
O’Brien said a combination of unfavorable court rulings and ill-advised legal agreements signed by previous administrations have increased the amount of time it takes to deport illegal immigrants and has reduced how long they can be detained while those proceedings churn on.
He added that immigration cases, for the most part, are supposed to be quick and simple. Typically, the only element the government has to show is that the person is unlawfully in the country and is not eligible for an immigration benefit, like asylum.
The proceedings are civil, not criminal, and require less evidence and a lower burden of proof.
But O’Brien said complicated, drawn-out cases are becoming more common.
“More and more, you’re seeing the ACLU and these other groups talking about immigration as if it were a full-blown trial,” he said.
O’Brien said many states now require judges to warn illegal immigrants before they plead guilty to crimes that doing so may subject them to deportation. And if judges fail to deliver that warning, it is grounds for overturning the conviction, O’Brien said.
In relatively minor cases, O’Brien added, prosecutors often simply drop the charges when that happens.
“The average illegal alien gets more due process than Americans in criminal cases,” he said.
The Trump administration has urged Congress to pass new laws to speed the deportation process. Short of this, O’Brien said there are things the administration can do. For instance, he said, the administration could revisit agreements previous administrations made to settle lawsuits, such as one from the 1990s that prohibits the government from detaining illegal immigrant children for more than 72 hours.
“These agreements are not written in stone,” he said. “They don’t have to stay there.”
Vaughan said the administration could make greater use of “expedited removal,” a process created by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which allows for the deportation of illegal immigrants without a formal immigration hearing.
Related: Senate GOPers, Democrats Can’t Agree on Immigration Loopholes
The Obama administration used the procedure for illegal immigrants caught within 100 miles of the border who had been in the United States 14 days or less. But the law allows it to be used for people who have been in the United States for up to two years.
But Vaughan said expedited removal requires illegal immigrants to be detained, and detention space is at a premium.
“There’s no getting around the fact that they need more beds, that they need more funding for beds,” she said.
PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.
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