A recent article in the New York Times is headlined “How Many People Has Trump Deported So Far?” The stats offered by the “Gray Lady” look fairly accurate, but the story it’s attempting to tell — that Trump II is lagging prior administrations in “deporting” removable aliens from the United States — is suspect. That’s largely because of the facts the “newspaper of record” conveniently ignores — particularly about the correlation between “at large” arrests and “sanctuary” jurisdictions.

“What Is a Deportation?”

The Times asks the question “What is a deportation?”, which is fundamental to its analysis.

But then the article fails to answer that critical question, asserting: “Counting deportations is not as straightforward as it seems because there is not a specific legal definition.” Perhaps an outlet that holds itself in high esteem should check its own archives (colloquially the Times’ “morgue”).

The reason there’s no “specific legal definition” for “deportations” is because Congress formally retired it nearly 30 years ago (for legal reasons), swapping out both that term — which referred to the expatriation of aliens who had entered the United States — and “exclusions” (which referred to aliens stopped and turned around at the ports and borders) for “removals”.

“Removal” refers to the expulsion of aliens ordered removed by DHS under the “expedited removal” process in section 235(b)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), as well as those ordered removed by immigration judges at the end of administrative “removal proceedings” process under section 240 of the INA.

To be fair, most — expert and casual observer alike — continue to use “deportations” to refer to removals, because it’s a term we all understand.

Vestiges of that retired term continue to haunt the INA, including when Congress delineated the grounds of removability for aliens who have been “admitted” to the United States (as defined in section 101(a)(13)(A) of the INA) in section 237 of the act, captioned “Deportable aliens”.

The real goal the Times is attempting to achieve is valid, which is measuring the number of removable aliens who have left the United States since Donald Trump returned, including: aliens removed under final removal orders, aliens turned around at the borders and the ports, crewmen with denied requests to land, and otherwise removable aliens who left on their own accord (so-called “self-deportations”).

The newspaper’s effort is complicated by the fact that various administrations have fudged their “deportation” totals for decades by lumping in “turn-arounds” at the borders and the ports (as well as crewmen) with more formal removals.

The Obama administration was likely the most egregious offender in that regard, which is why you should take characterizations of the 44th president as the “deporter in chief” with a grain of salt.

It was a title he gleefully accepted in a failed gambit to pass the amnesty he desperately desired, but at this point it’s so baked into the analysis it’s unfair to judge his successors by any other metric.

By the way, measured in this manner, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would share the “deporter in chief” title for the 1.864 million removals and returns they oversaw in FY 2000, with Reagan a close finisher at 1.61 million in 1986. In contrast, Obama broke 850,000 just once, in FY 2010.

The Demographic Shift in Illegal Immigration

For most of his administration, Obama (and his predecessors) had a “deportation” advantage Biden and Trump didn’t: Prior to FY 2011, illegal migrants at the Southwest border were almost exclusively single adults — mostly male — from Mexico, and even up to FY 2014, the majority were.

When Border Patrol agents apprehend a single adult from Mexico at the Southwest border, they can generally process the alien and turn him back to Mexico in about eight hours. That’s a “deportation” under that continuing Obama-era calculus.

The problem is that about a quarter of those FY 2011 illegal migrants were “recidivists”, meaning they came back after they were turned around, and when they were apprehended again and returned once more, officially counted as a second deportation.

Given that the Southwest border recidivism rate was 30 percent or higher between FY 2005 (when DHS first attempted to capture that statistic) and FY 2009, you can understand how specious Obama’s record on “deportations” was.

From FY 2014 until Trump II, however, most illegal entrants weren’t Mexican nationals, and importantly at certain times weren’t single adults (let alone males), either.

In FY 2019, the high point for illegal immigration under Trump I, just 19.5 percent of the 851,500-plus Southwest border apprehensions involved Mexican nationals, and more than 64.5 percent involved either adult migrants entering illegally with children in “family units” (“FMUs”, 55.6 percent) or “unaccompanied alien children” (“UACs”, 8.9 percent) travelling alone.

Thanks to a combination of poorly reasoned court decisions and equally poorly considered laws, DHS had to release nearly all of those FMUs and UACs, and because most of the single adults were “other than Mexican” (OTMs), they couldn’t be quickly turned around, either.

Trump I responded to that OTM/FMU surge with the “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico”, under which a small number of OTM FMUs and single adults were sent back across the border to await their asylum hearings, but that process didn’t produce “deportations” even under the lax Obama-era standards.

The good news for Trump II is that those pre-FY 2014 border demographics have returned, for now.

Of the 79,507 illegal migrants apprehended at the Southwest border between last February (the first full month of Trump II) and December, two-thirds (67 percent or 53,395) were Mexican nationals, 86 percent of whom were single adults.

Because, again, those Mexican nationals can be quickly returned, that flow boosts total “deportations” under the lax Obama-era “deportation” definition the Times prefers, but because Southwest border illegal entries have fallen by more than 90 percent under Trump II, it also detracts from the total.

The differences in border apprehension and return totals between the current administration and the last one are why the Times argues “the total number of deportations since Mr. Trump took office [is] 540,000 — fewer than in the last two years of the Biden administration, when border crossings were at record highs”, but the higher Biden numbers signal the weakness of his policies, not their strength.

More aliens attempted to enter illegally under Biden because they assumed (usually correctly) that they’d be able to remain. Fewer are coming now because they understand they likely won’t be allowed to stay, and lower attempted entries means more border security, or as Congress termed it, “operational control”.

“Interior Removals”

As I’ve explained in the past, the key metric for measuring the effectiveness of immigration enforcement efforts is ICE “deportations” of aliens within the United States (as opposed to at the border), formally known as “interior removals” (a term of art, even if it’s news to the Times). Here’s why that’s true.

Border enforcement is “reactive” because generally, DHS can’t control the number of migrants who come to the border illegally.

Biden was the exception to that rule, because by releasing nearly all (88.5 percent) of the illegal entrants who arrived at the borders and the ports, his administration spurred the largest illicit migrant surge in U.S. history, while (ironically) also boosting “deportations” of the rest under the Times’ flawed reasoning.

Interior enforcement, on the other hand, is proactive: DHS must identify, arrest, detain, and prosecute those aliens before it removes them.

Under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations in FY 2009, ICE set its most recent record for interior removals, nearly 238,000 that fiscal year. Interior removals tapered off thereafter, however, falling 72.6 percent from that record by FY 2016 (65,332).

That decline occurred when the Obama administration added a new wrinkle to interior removals, focusing its interior enforcement efforts at first (in March 2011) to a degree and then (in November 2014) almost exclusively on criminal aliens living in the United States.

That Obama “criminal alien” standard has come to define the purpose of “deportations” in the collective minds of many Americans and most in the media, which is why you see so many hit pieces now that deride ICE under Trump II for arresting “non-criminal” aliens in the interior.

“Deportation Is Crucial”

Trump supporters and many on the right usually respond to such attacks by noting most of those aliens are “criminals” because it’s a crime to enter the United States illegally (under section 275 of the INA) or highlighting the crimes “otherwise law-abiding aliens” must commit to remain here, like identity theft.

Those points are true and indisputable, but they miss three more important points.

First, it’s impossible to secure the border against a surge in illegal migrants, drugs, and other contraband if would-be migrants believe that if they can enter illegally and avoid the cops once they are here, they will be inoculated against “deportation”.

Second, the cognate to the (legitimate) focus on the due process rights of aliens in removal proceedings is the duty of the United States to remove aliens who have been accorded that due process and ordered removed.

Simply put, aliens have some level of protection under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, but so do Americans in the removal process, which is why ICE represents their interests in immigration courts.

Third, as Barbara Jordan explained:

Deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.

If the lead-up to the November 2024 elections demonstrated anything, it’s that Americans’ support for even legal immigration inevitably declines when they realize our immigration system lacks credibility and fails to serve our “national interest”.

Restoring credibility to our immigration system requires removals, regardless of whether those aliens are criminals or not. Obama may have minimized non-criminal removals, but there’s no reason ICE must continue to play that game.

230,000 Interior Removals

With that background, the Times reports there have been 230,000 ICE interior removals since Trump returned, out of what it terms 540,000 “deportations”.

Assuming that interior removal statistic is correct, the agency has fallen just slightly short of that (most recent) FY 2009 record of almost 238,000 interior removals, but then again: (1) ICE is far outperforming interior removals during the Biden years; and (2) is doing so in a much more challenging environment.

The Times concedes the first point but let me explain the second.

The Center defines “sanctuary jurisdictions” as:

cities, counties, and states [with] laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.

As I explained to Congress last May, while some jurisdictions implemented sanctuary policies decades ago, the movement really took off in response to DHS’s mid-2010s “Secure Communities” program. Basically, state and local support for ICE enforcement took a nosedive around 2014.

Which brings me to the following excerpt from the Times’ article:

In the past, ICE made most of its arrests in partnership with local jails and prisons, quietly taking into custody immigrants who had already been arrested by another law enforcement agency.

. . .

Arrests at jails and prisons went up over the past year, but the increase was far exceeded by the growth in what ICE calls “at-large” arrests, the apprehensions of immigrants on the streets, in courthouses, and at homes and businesses. These quadrupled to about 150,000 and made up a majority of immigration arrests in 32 states and Washington, D.C.

They were most common in states like California, Illinois and New York, where local governments have passed laws blocking local jails and prisons from transferring people to ICE custody.

The Times doesn’t use the word “sanctuary”, but “laws blocking local jails and prisons from transferring people to ICE custody” are the definition of such policies. Its omission of the term was deliberate.

In any event, that article includes a map of the states in which ICE has made “at-large” arrests under Trump II, concentrated almost exclusively in the Northeast (including New York and Massachusetts), the Northwest (Washington and Oregon), Illinois, and (curiously) Alaska.

Except for Georgia, at-large arrests are significantly lower south of Virginia and (aside from Oklahoma) in the Plains states and in the Southwest.

That at-large arrest map correlates with the Center’s sanctuary jurisdiction map, which explains why clashes between protestors and ICE officers are almost exclusively limited to a few areas.

As I recently explained, three states (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee) accounted for more than a third of all ICE arrests, because those states mandate cooperation by local officials with immigration authorities.

When ICE can simply pick up a criminal alien from a “secure location” like a jail or prison, officers don’t need to hit the streets looking for them.

When the agency is barred by sanctuary laws from arresting those aliens as soon as they are released from state and local custody, however, it must go into the community looking for them, and the pervasiveness of such laws explains a separate chart in the Times article showing a rise in “at-large” arrests under Trump II.

A Toxic Mix of Stupidity and Political Calculation

Two weeks after Trump returned, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison issued an opinion finding that counties in his state could not hold criminal aliens on ICE detainers.

That, of course, forced ICE officers into neighborhoods looking for those criminal aliens, and soon, officials in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes began vilifying the agency’s enforcement efforts, with Gov. Tim Walz (D) referring to ICE as “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo” and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D) claiming the agency’s “activities are largely built around terrorizing people”.

That was a month before Frey told ICE to “Get the f*** out of Minneapolis”, and the situation has since devolved into a toxic mix of stupidity and political calculation with Walz, Frey, and the rest egging on (likely) well-meaning but misinformed and occasionally violent protestors who attempt to interpose themselves between ICE officers and arrest targets.

“How Many People Has Trump Deported So Far?” More than prior administrations, but fewer than the president would like. While the Times’ statistics are helpful, maybe next time “all the news that’s fit to print” will include some critical analysis, as well. In the interim, I’m always here to offer it.