Deportations fall under Trump
Arrests by immigration and customs agents rise
Despite President Donald Trump’s push for tougher immigration enforcement, U.S. agents are on pace to deport fewer people in the government’s 2017 fiscal year than during the same period last year, the latest statistics show.
Trump took office pledging to round up as many as 3 million drug dealers, gang members and other criminals he said were living in the United States illegally. But the most recent figures from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, indicate the government may be having a hard time finding enough eligible “bad hombres,” as the president described them, to quickly meet those targets.
According to the most recent figures provided by the agency, as of Sept. 9, three weeks before the end of the 2017 fiscal year, ICE had deported 211,068 immigrants. ICE removed 240,255 people during the government’s 2016 fiscal year.
The lower totals are not for lack of effort. According to ICE, its agents have made 43 percent more arrests since Trump took office compared with the same period last year.
While ICE took into custody more immigrants with criminal records, the fastest-growing category of arrests since Trump’s inauguration is those of people facing no criminal charges.
The agency arrested more than 28,000 “non-criminal immigration violators” between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, according to the agency’s records, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.
“ICE has taken the gloves off, and they are going after whoever they want and for whatever reason,” said Ray Ybarra Maldonado, an immigration attorney in Phoenix. “It’s a free-for-all now.”
There appear to be several factors that explain why deportations have declined despite the increase in arrests, according to policy experts, immigration attorneys and current and former ICE officials.
The number of people attempting to sneak across the U.S. border with Mexico fell dramatically in the months following Trump’s inauguration, reducing the supply of easy-to-deport immigrants.
And while the administration has directed ICE to ramp up enforcement, antipathy toward the president’s policies has supercharged the fundraising ability of advocacy groups and pro-bono law firms that help immigrants fight deportation. The additional arrests and litigation appear to be putting a new burden on the U.S. federal immigration court system, which faces a backlog of more than 600,000 cases.
It may take years before immigrants arrested under Trump can be deported after exhausting their appeals.
Ina Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted last week, 62 percent of Americans said they disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration.
ICE removals reached a high of 410,000 in the government’s 2012 fiscal year, when critics of President Barack Obama labeled him “deporter in chief.”
In the years that followed, ICE agents were instructed to prioritize immigrants with criminal records, and roughly two-thirds of the agency’s removals were immigrants picked up along the border, including many with existing deportation orders who were caught trying to sneak back in.
But illegal crossings plunged in the first several months of the Trump administration, with apprehensions by U.S. border agents down by as much as twothirds compared with the same period in 2016.
ICE officials say they will continue to prioritize criminal suspects. While the number of U.S. jurisdictions that have sought new partnerships with ICE has increased since Trump took office, others with sanctuary policies, such as Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, have become less cooperative, according to Randy Capps, research director at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.