It’s the lie that never seems to die – the notion that the Obama Administration is effectively deporting illegal aliens. Just recently, presidential contender Hillary Clinton declared:
“The deportation laws were … enforced, you know, very aggressively during the last six and a half years, which I think his administration did in part to try to get Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform. That strategy is no longer workable. So therefore I think we have to go back to being a much less harsh and aggressive enforcer.”
The truth is that the administration has systematically sabotaged immigration law enforcement, particularly deportation of illegal aliens from the interior. In 2010, the union representing employees of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sounded alarm over this unfolding policy and expressed “no confidence” in the leadership of ICE for implementing it.
Nevertheless, the administration and its enablers in the media began pounding the mantra that President Obama was overseeing “record deportations” of illegal aliens. This bogus claim derived from a statistical sleight-of-hand, namely padding the deportation total (from the interior) with the number of illegal aliens apprehended and sent home at the border. Previous administrations did not tally deportations in this fashion.
The apparent reason for this hoodwinking was what Hillary Clinton alluded to in her comment. The administration hoped that by appearing tough on enforcement it could persuade Republicans to given in on “comprehensive immigration reform,” its code word for amnesty. The propaganda about “record deportations” was so incessant that even quite a number of illegal alien advocates were taken in by it. In anger, they began to denounce President Obama as the “deporter-in-chief.”
Hoping to clue them into what was really going on, the deporter-in-chief held a meeting with some Hispanic journalists and informed them that the claim about record deportations was “a little deceptive.” Actually it was more than a little, as a number of critics began to reveal. Finally, even the head of Obama’s Department of Homeland Security admitted that the alleged record came from padding the interior deportation figures with enforcement statistics from the border.
Interior enforcement has drastically declined under Obama’s watch. This year the total number of deportees was less than one-third of what it was in 2011, when the policies against enforcement began to take effect. To justify its lax policies, the Administration claims that it gives a pass to most illegal aliens in order to focus on deporting those who are hard-core criminals and threats to public safety.
It boasts that the percentage of these criminals among all deportees has risen in recent years. Here, however, is another statistical sleight-of-hand. Yes, the percentage has increased, but the overall numbers of criminal aliens sent home has steadily declined. To illustrate, in 2011 ICE deported 150,000 criminal aliens, out of a total of nearly 240,000 deportees. This year the criminal aliens went down to just 63,000 – out of a total of 69,000 deportees.
And this decline is not due to any shortage criminal aliens to deport. Currently, there are 180,000 of these aliens with deportation orders still living in the U.S. Many are protected in “sanctuary cities” which, in violation of federal law, refuse to cooperate with ICE. The Obama Administration has consistently declined to stop this defiance.
The total of 69,000 illegal aliens the Administration managed to round up and deport from the interior this year barely made a dent in the 11 million or more illegal aliens now residing in the U.S. So now will it finally sink in – even to Hillary Clinton – that Obama is no tough-as-nails enforcer? Don’t count on it.
It now seems that the president has decided to refurbish – at least to some extent – his deporter persona. The administration recently announced that it was going to step up enforcement against illegal aliens with deportation orders, many who have come from Central America.
It’s hard not to be cynical about this announcement. Could it be an election-year ploy, another “little deception” to reduce criticism of the president’s party for not enforcing immigration laws? The probable answer is “yes.” From our deceiver-in-chief we can hardly expect anything else.