Deportations fall under Trump despite ICE arrests

WASHINGTON» Despite President 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 (ICE) indicate the government may be having a hard time finding enough eligible “bad hombres,” as the president described them, to meet those targets quickly.

As of Sept. 9, three weeks before the end of the 2017 fiscal year, ICE had deported 211,068 immigrants, according to the most recent figures provided by the agency. 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 vs. 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 are those facing no criminal charges. The agency arrested more than 28,000 “noncriminal immigration violators” between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, according to the agency’s records, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.

There appear to be several factors that explain why deportations have declined.

The number of people attempting to sneak across the U.S. border with Mexico fell dramatically in the months after Trump’s inauguration.

And although 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.