The ongoing assault on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is truly unhinged from reality. As one pundit observed of the Left\u2019s latest open-borders crusade: There\u2019s more outrage over ICE than ISIS.<\/p>\n
Data \u2013 and the lack of it \u2013 tell a far different story than the screamers in the streets<\/a>.<\/p>\n Just as the Abolish-ICE crowd conveniently glosses over Barack Obama\u2019s migrant detention centers, they ignore the most recently reported deportation numbers.<\/p>\n In fiscal year 2017 (which included four months of the Obama administration), ICE deported 226,119 people, fewe<\/em><\/a>r<\/em> than the previous year’s 240,255. In fiscal 2012, Obama\u2019s ICE agents deported 409,849 (still less than 4 percent of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens in this country).<\/p>\n Under Trump, ICE deportations are trending down, not up. That certainly cannot be due to a diminishing number of deportable individuals.<\/p>\n Then there are the detainers, which ICE uses to hold suspected criminal aliens in local jails. Since these detainers are merely requests, sanctuary cities across the country can and (thanks to meddling by lower courts) do reject them with impunity.<\/p>\n Local resistance notwithstanding, here\u2019s another blow to the ICE-as-Gestapo narrative: Detainer requests are down, too.<\/p>\n Through April 2018, ICE was issuing an average of 14,000 new detainers each month. That\u2019s far below the peak levels under Obama, when more than 20,000 detainers were prepared monthly.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pace under President Trump shows no indication of returning to those higher detainer usage levels,\u201d reports the<\/p>\n Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC)<\/a>, a nonpartisan research center at Syracuse University.<\/p>\n More troubling, ICE is clamming up. Inexplicably, the agency no longer discloses how many detainers are actually fulfilled, or if they lead to deportation. (TRAC is suing ICE to get these statistics formerly supplied by the agency.)<\/p>\n As ICE agents run up against new impediments daily — Philadelphia last month scrapped its agreement<\/a> to notify ICE of felony and misdemeanor arrests made by city police \u2013 the agency isn\u2019t helping itself by withholding relevant data that is public record.<\/p>\n Far from looking like a tough immigration-enforcement agency, is ICE melting under pressure? Paging Mr. Trump.