The Washington Post claimed last year that the Trump administration was deporting fewer illegal aliens than Barack Obama. Time for an update.
In Fiscal Year 2017, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more than 81,000 aliens from the interior of the country. More than 61,000 of those removals occurred after Trump’s Inauguration Day — an increase of 37 percent over the same period in FY2016.
While the Trump Effect of tough talk and stricter enforcement suppressed illegal border crossings (leading to commensurately lower removal numbers there), ICE ramped up interior enforcement efforts. Considering that Trump took office three months into the fiscal year, he’s on pace to out-deport the so-called Deporter in Chief (who vastly inflated removal statistics by counting people turned around at the border as deportations).
Arrests of “noncriminal aliens” are up 200-300 percent in a dozen major U.S. cities – including many sanctuary jurisdictions – and resulting deportations are climbing, as well.
But there are some troubling signs. Deportations declined by double-digit percentages in El Paso, San Antonio, and San Diego.
Going forward, the administration figures to increase deportations with the signing of foreign repatriation agreements. Though barely reported in the mainstream media, these important accords will expedite removal of illegal aliens back to such places as Somalia, Guinea, Cuba, Bangladesh, Iraq and Afghanistan. (In exchange for Washington dropping Iraq from its travel ban, Baghdad agreed not to fight repatriations.)
Though Mexicans and Central Americans historically comprise 90 percent of deportations, removals to other nations rose 24 percent in Trump’s first year. Deportations to Haiti soared from 300 in 2016 to more than 5,500 last year. Deportations to Brazil and China also jumped, while removals of Ghanaians and West Africans more than doubled.
The convoluted case of a Jordanian businessman illustrates how deportation orders are stymied or simply ignored, and how the Trump administration is taking action.
Amer Othman had been living in the U.S. on an expired green card since the mid-1990s. A deportation order was finally issued in 2007, but Othman dodged removal through administrative appeals and a series of “private bills” filed by Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio.
Othman was sent back in his home country last month, leaving Ryan to complain about “a new set of rules” at Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.
Those “new rules” scrap the Obama era order to limit deportations to public safety threats, convicted criminals and recent border crossers. Under Trump, any foreign national without valid papers is subject to removal. That means U.S. deportation laws, as originally written and intended, can be enforced. Bravo.