Quote: (04-22-2017 06:06 PM)Jean Valjean Wrote:
Is Trump deporting illegals more aggressively than Obama did, or is he just getting more media coverage for it than Obama did? Are there some meaningful statistics by which we might compare the two?
Here's an article from the Washington Post with some recent statistics. It appears that I was somewhat off in my previous post; the article says that immigration arrests have gone up since January, compared to 2016. But, deportations are slightly down from 2016 (even while arrests are up).
ICE immigration arrests of noncriminals double under Trump
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Immigration arrests rose 32.6 percent in the first weeks of the Trump administration, with newly empowered federal agents intensifying their pursuit of not just undocumented immigrants with criminal records, but also thousands of illegal immigrants who have been otherwise law-abiding.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21,362 immigrants, mostly convicted criminals, from January through mid-March, compared to 16,104 during the same period last year, according to statistics requested by The Washington Post.
Overall, deportations are down by 1.2 percent, to 54,741 in January, February and March, compared to the same period last year. Elzea said it can take time to remove someone from the United States, but the number of noncriminals deported is higher this year, while the number of criminals who were deported fell.
Meanwhile, an article from the Atlantic notes that the backlog of deportation cases is about 500,000. How the hell can just a few hundred immigration judges handle that caseload? Even a thousand more judges would seemingly not be enough.
Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Overwhelming a Strained System
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By last September, the end of the 2016 fiscal year, there were more than 500,000 of them pending, according to a March report by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice.