Good Question: How Common Is Deportation?
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- United States immigration agents arrested more than 600 people across several states last week.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told WCCO nine others caught in the Twin Cities were not part of the sweep that the Department of Homeland Security called "routine." But some still fear these arrests could signal a policy change.
Just after his election, President Donald Trump told CBS's "60 Minutes" that there are millions of dangerous undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
"Gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could even be three million. We're getting them out of our country," President Trump said.
During President Barack Obama's eight years, the U.S. deported 2.5 million people -- the largest number of people deported by any single president. Critics of his immigration policies even nicknamed him "deporter-in-chief."
"We see in Obama a concentration of massive amount of money and agents in deporting people," said John Keller, executive director of the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. "But on the other hand, a level of discretion for people who arrived as children."
The Department of Homeland Security says there was a steady rise in deportation based on an order of removal from 189,026 in 2001 to 333,341 in 2015. The peak year was 2013 at 434,015.
But what those removal numbers do not show is how many people were returned but not officially deported; those who were just sent back, mostly when caught at the border. Returns were over 1.3 million in 2001 and had dropped to 129,122 in 2015.
There was a policy change during the second half of the Bush administration, when DHS started to limit returns and increase removals.
"The political calculation of the George Bush administration was that if we deport enough people, if we show enough enforcement, we'll eventually get to immigration reform," Keller said. "And then President Obama, when he entered, basically used the same political calculation."
In 2015, the vast majority of deportees were from Mexico (72 percent), followed by Guatemala (10 percent), El Salvador (6 percent) and Honduras (6 percent). About two-thirds of those deported were found at the border.
DHS also tracks criminal histories. In 2015, 42 percent of those deported had prior criminal convictions. In 2014, DHS published a memo that laid out the priority list of who should be deported. At the top of the list were people who posed a threat to national security, felons and people who were entering the U.S. illegally. At the bottom of the list were people who had lived in the U.S. for years and did not pose any threat.
"There's a real mixture of, yes, some people who represent a threat to the United States," Keller said. "But the vast majority are not dangerous."
President Trump issued an executive order in January that broadened those deportation policies. Keller says it is too early to tell what the impact on deportations could be over the next few months.
Everyone facing deportation is entitled to a lawyer. There is currently a record backlogs in immigration courts. It takes about two-and-a-half years to fight a deportation case in Minnesota.