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Given his rhetoric demonizing undocumented immigrants and his promise to engage in mass deportations When he returns to the White House in January, it will be quite shocking to find that deportations have actually declined in the four years Donald Trump has been president.

It’s also surprising that President Joe Biden’s administration has kept pace and deported similar numbers of people as Trump’s.

There’s a lot of context missing from these numbers. Trump has spent his presidency hyperfocused on immigration, trying to build a wall on the southern border, limiting travel to the United States from majority-Muslim countries and signaling to Americans and the world that the United States will not would not be as welcoming.

Trump also authorized immigration raids on businesses, which happens to him. »border tsar” said Tom Homan, former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who expects more after Trump takes office in January.

Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Homan said Trump 2.0 would be like his first term but with more deportations.

“It will be the same as under the first administration, it’s just there will be a lot more because 10 million people are entering this country illegally under the Biden administration,” Homan said.

Why did Obama deport more people than Trump?

During his first term, Trump also promised mass deportations. And he actually deported large numbers of people — more than 1.5 million — during his four years in office, according to Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

But that’s about half the 2.9 million evictions undertaken during Barack Obama’s first term and fewer than the 1.9 million evictions during Obama’s second term. That’s on par with Biden’s 1.49 million evictions, according to updated calculations Bush-Joseph shared with me. Those figures do not include millions of people turned away at the border under a Covid-era policy adopted by Trump and used during most of Biden’s term.

It takes a lot of context to explain these numbers. Biden’s expulsions focus on border, Bush-Joseph says. Both Trump and Obama’s numbers include more deportations from within the country.

Obama’s deportations focused on single men from Mexico, she said, while today undocumented immigrants are more likely to come to the United States from further afield and within family units. This complicates the return process, not only logistically, but also because many countries will not accept repatriations. Mexico began welcoming people from different countries under an agreement with the Biden administration.

“An important context for any administration that deals with deportations is that the U.S. immigration system is extremely outdated, overwhelmed and under-resourced,” Bush-Joseph said, noting that there are 1.3 million people in the United States who have already received an eviction notice but who have already received an eviction notice. not been expelled.

Another factor that has reduced the number of deportations is that many local law enforcement agencies have stopped cooperating with federal immigration authorities, a change that began under President Obama and s This is amplified during Trump’s term, according to David Bier, director of immigration studies within the Libertarian Party. Cato Institute.

Unintended consequences

Bier’s research found that Trump’s tough approach during his first term had unintended consequences.

For example, rather than prioritizing the deportation of people with criminal records, Trump broadened his focus by placing less emphasis on immigration enforcement against people considered security threats public and prioritizing measures against anyone living illegally in the country. This led to Trump’s controversial family separation policy.

Bier supports that by filling detention centers with asylum seekers rather than focusing on detaining people suspected of having criminal histories, the Trump administration ended up allowing more people with criminal histories to enter the country.

In a separate studyBier also examined the increase in detentions of people who crossed the border illegally during Trump’s term and found that it did not lead to a substantial increase in the number of expulsions.

Operating at full capacity

Even though Trump is sure to authorize the type of raids that will attract public attention and include the expulsion of people with family members in the United States, the system is so overwhelmed at present that actions of Trump could not lead to a dramatic increase in deportations.

Creating a camp system to accommodate some of the more than 11 million people Trump says he wants to deport would overshadow the project. current total federal and state prison populationnot to mention the cost of detaining so many people for their day in court.

“The idea that they will be able to quickly put in place the infrastructure to carry out evictions by the millions is just a fantasy,” Bier told me.

“You’re talking about families.”

John Sandweg, former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration, said on CNN last week that ICE currently has about 41,000 beds in detention centers. He said one of the main concerns is that Trump might try to find ways to get around the overwhelmed court system to deport people without a hearing.

Sandweg argued that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants have never committed a crime in the United States and that a large share of them – 4.6 million, according to his estimates – live in mixed-status families with spouses or children who are citizens.

“When you turn this into a digital game and say, ‘We’re going to reach a million in a year,’ you’re not just talking about criminals,” Sandweg said. “There aren’t a million criminals to catch. You’re talking about families, and that’s the real concern here.

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