Removal numbers have traditionally consisted of legal immigrants who have
committed crimes, those who overstay visas, or illegal aliens caught inside the
country.
The immigration statistics yearbook states that removals are the compulsory
and confirmed movement of an inadmissible or deportable alien out of the
United States based on an order of removal.
An alien who is removed has administrative or criminal consequences placed
on subsequent reentry owing to the fact of the removal.
In the past, removal numbers did not include “returns,” who are Mexican
nationals caught illegally crossing the border by the Border Patrol and returned.
According to the yearbook, returns are the confirmed movement of an
inadmissible or deportable alien out of the United States not based on an
order of removal.
Most of the voluntary returns are of Mexican nationals who have been
apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol and are returned to Mexico.
The Obama administration has started counting certain “returns” as
“removals” in order to artificially inflate the numbers and create a
“record level” of deportations.
Specifically, those caught by the Border
Patrol who are shuttled to a different town along the border before they are
returned are being dishonestly counted as deportations.
This has falsely
increased the number of total removals by more than 100,000 for the\
past two years.
In fact, if we count removals and returns together historically, then the
Obama administration numbers are not close to “record-setting.” In the
1990s, the totals of returns and removals were well over one million.
For example, according to the yearbook of immigration statistics, in
1996, removals and returns numbered more than 1.6 million, up from
more than 1.3 million in 1995.
In an October 2011 roundtable with Hispanic reporters, President Obama
himself said the deportation numbers were artificially high because they include
those caught at the border:
“The statistics are actually a little deceptive because what we’ve been doing
is, with the stronger border enforcement, we’ve been apprehending folks at
the borders and sending them back. That is counted as a deportation, even
though they may have only been held for a day or 48 hours, sent back – that’s
counted as a deportation.”
On January 31, 2013, White House domestic policy chief Cecilia Muñoz –
formerly the Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy and
Legislation at the National Council of La Raza – blamed Congress for the
“record” number of deportations carried out by the Obama administration:
“The government’s job is to do what Congress tells it to do. Congress, under
the immigration laws that we’ve got now, Congress requires us to remove
people who are removable and gives DHS, frankly, a whole lot of resources to
do that job. DHS’s job is to make sure they make the best possible decisions
on how they use those resources.”
The
Washington Post Reveals the Fraud
In December 2010, the Washington Post revealed that U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) had included more than 19,000 illegal immigrants
who had exited the country in the previous fiscal year in its deportation
statistics for the current (2010) fiscal year.
On February 22, 2010, ICE Detention and Removal Operations issued a
memo stating that, despite record deportations of criminals, the overall
number of removals was down.
According to the memo, while ICE was on pace to achieve “the Agency goal of
150,000 criminal alien removals” for the year ending September 30th, total
deportations were set to barely top 310,000, "
Welll under the Agency’s goal of
400,000” and nearly 20 percent below the 2009 total of 387,000.
The memo also explained how ICE would inflate the number: increasing
detention space to hold more illegal immigrants while they await deportation
proceedings; sweeping prisons and jails to find more candidates for
deportation and offering early release for those willing to go quickly; and a
surge in efforts to catch illegal immigrants who lied on immigration or visa
applications or reentered the U.S. after being deported.
The memo also encouraged field directors to “maximize” participation in the
Mexican Interior Repatriation Program (MIRP), a bilaterally voluntary program
that attempts to quickly return Mexican nationals found unlawfully in the
Sonora Arizona desert region of the U.S. to their places of origin in the Mexican
interior. The program is run by ICE, the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs
and the Mexican Ministry of the Interior.
Under this program, aliens caught by U.S. Border Patrol agents are turned
over to ICE to carry out the returns.
Since MIRP’s inception in 2004, the program had never started earlier than
July 7th each year.
In 2010, the first group returned to Mexico on June 1st. By starting in June,
ICE tallied 6,527 returns that in the past would have been handled and
counted by the U.S. Border Patrol.
In total, 23,384 Mexicans between June and September of that year accepted
flights back to Mexico City and then a bus ticket to their home town at a cost
of almost $15 million.
An ICE spokesman claimed the agency started the
program early because of available funds and a timely agreement between
the U.S. and Mexico.
According to the Washington Post, internal emails showed that when ICE
officials realized in the final weeks of the fiscal year, which ended September
10th, that ICE’s numbers would fall short of the previous year’s mark, they
quietly directed immigration officers to bypass immigration courts whenever
possible and encourage eligible foreign nationals to agree to voluntarily return to
their countries without a negative mark on their immigration record.
This allowed hundreds of immigrants who typically would have gone
before an immigration judge to contest deportation offenses such as
drunk driving, domestic violence and misdemeanor assault to leave
the country without a statutory civil or criminal bar for applying for
legal residence or traveling to the U.S. in the future.
According to the emails, once ICE met its goals for 2010, it directed agents to
stop offering voluntary returns and revert to business as usual.
According to an October 1, 2010 email obtained by the Washington Post, an
acting ICE assistant director cheered field directors on to the finish line: “We
are just 106 shy of 390,000. However, we still get to count closed cases through
Monday, October 4th so… keep having your folks concentrate on closing those
Starting in 2009, ICE stopped counting deportations for the fiscal year
ending September 30th in the first few days of October. Any deportations
that take place in one fiscal year but are confirmed after October 5th are
added to the next fiscal year’s statistics.
Based on the new accounting approach, ICE was able to 19,422 removals
from 2009 in the 2010 statistics. In 2010, 373,440 other people were
deported.
If ICE had not included the 19,422 departures, removals would have
fallen by almost 16,000 from the previous year and by about 20,000 in
2009.
At a news conference on October 6, 2010, ICE Director John Morton said that no
unusual practices were used to break the previous year’s mark: “When the
secretary tells you that the numbers are at an all-time high, that’s straight, on
the merits, no cooking of the books. It’s what happened.”
However, Chris Crane, President of the ICE Union, stated that offering voluntary
return was not a common practice and that it was “breaking the rules
to break the record.”
On October 5, 2011, Secretary Napolitano announced that a “record” 195,000
convicted criminals had been removed in 2010.
However, DHS’s Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) reported that only 168,532 convicted
criminal aliens were removed in 2010.
Napolitano also announced that
there were 392,862 aliens removed from the country in 2010,
while OIS reported 387,242 removals
.
The primary reason for the difference is that Napolitano is using the numbers
reported by ICE, which uses different methodology than the OIS whose numbers
are arguably more accurate.
OIS has used a consistent methodology to calculate immigration statistics,
while ICE has changed its methodology for the sole reason of meeting
numerical outputs.
The only possible reason to reject the OIS numbers is to give the appearance
that DHS is deporting illegals in record numbers. Although OIS does not
keep track of paroles and deferments, its numbers are a more accurate
reflection of this administration’s failure to enforce immigration laws.
According to OIS statistics, the number of removals from 2009 has decreased
by 7,923 and returns have decreased by 109,759. The number of arrests
made by DHS has decreased 66% from about 1.8 million in 1999 to about
600,000 in 2010.
While prosecutions increased slightly in the years prior to
2005, the general trend has been downward for at least ten years.
Padding the Numbers: The Alien Transfer Exit Program
Since 2011, the Obama administration has counted removals from the Alien
Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) as ICE deportations, which artificially inflates
ICE removal numbers.
According to a source in a Border Patrol field office,
“the only reason this group [in the ATEP] program is in detention at a
is for the purpose of padding ICE’s year-end removal statistics.”
Created in 2008, ATEP is a program that moves Mexican nationals
apprehended in one Border Patrol Sector to another Sector before removing
them to Mexico. There are no penalties or bars attached when illegal
immigrants are sent back via ATEP and they can simply attempt re-entry. As
a result, illegal immigrants who are subject to ATEP can return to the U.S.
numerous cases only to be counted as removals each successive time they
reenter illegally and are apprehended at the border.
From 2008 to 2011, apprehensions through ATEP were counted in the U.S.
Border Patrol’s statistics, not ICE’s statistics. However, in 2011, the Obama
administration started including ATEP apprehensions by CBP in ICE’s
deportation statistics.
In the first seven months of 2012, ICE reported 221,656 arrests (ICE
apprehensions in the interior of the country), yet reported 334,249 removals
(deportations). The 112,000 additional removals were from the ATEP
(72,030) and an unknown source (40,000).
Thus, ICE removal statistics had
over 112,000 deportations included that previously had never been counted in
its deportation statistics.
In 2008, official ICE removals totaled 369,221; in 2009, 389,834; in 2010,
392,862; in 2011, 396,906; and in 2012, 409,849.
However, when ATEP removals are subtracted from ICE’s removals total, the
2011 number drops from 396,906 to roughly 360,319, and the 2012 number
drops from 409,849 to 324,299.
Therefore, if the ATEP removal numbers are subtracted from ICE’s 2011
removal numbers, total removals are 2.5% below 2008 levels, 7.5% below
2009 levels, and 8.3% below 2010 levels.
