This Year, The Government Is On Track To Deport Fewest Number Of Immigrants Since 2007 [why do white people think that the only thing Latino voters care about is immigration?]
/At a time when President Obama has delayed taking executive action to potentially stop deportations, an analysis of federal deportation data obtained by the Associated Press found that the government is “on pace to remove the fewest number of immigrants since 2007,” with deportations on track to dip 15 percent from the previous year.
Between October 2013 and July 2014, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency deported 258,608 immigrants at a rate of about 862 per day. As Dara Lind at Vox points out, if ICE “stays on that pace” through the end of the 2014 fiscal year (September 30), it could mean that deportations would be down 15 percent from 2013 when 1,010 immigrants a day were deported and down 23 percent from 2012 when the rate was 1,120 deported immigrants a day.
The AP stated two “principle reasons” that could have contributed to the decline in deportations, including the release of a series of ICE memos directing agents to focus their “deportation efforts on criminal immigrants or those who posed a threat to national security or public safety” as well as the influx of recent migrants across the southern border overwhelming temporary facilities that has led to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “release many people into the U.S. interior with instructions to report back to authorities later.”
ICE removal statistics indicate that about two-thirds of deportations come from the border, where migrants apprehended and detained were sent back without a court proceeding. Border deportations can also ensnare immigrants who didn’t recently cross the border, but live within 100 miles of the border, regardless of how long they have lived in the United States.
The President plans to move forward with an executive action on immigration, an event that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) optimistically said Thursday could happen by the end of the year. “We want people who are concerned about this to be hopeful that, by Thanksgiving and Christmas, there will be more security in their lives because of some discretion that the President will execute,” Pelosi said. White House chief of staff Denis McDonough told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Thursday that the President would go as far as he can under the law to enact promised immigration legislation that could include deportation reprieve and work authorization. The action could be similar to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program created in 2012 for some immigrants brought to the country as children.
