- The Trump administration still isn’t deporting as many immigrants annually as former President Barack Obama did in the early years of his presidency, Axios reported.
- Just 282,242 immigrants have been deported so far in the fiscal year 2019, whereas the Obama administration made 409,849 deportations in the fiscal year 2012.
- A key factor in Trump’s relatively slow rate of deportations is the limited resources of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, particularly as the influx of migrants at the southern border consumes the administration’s time and energy.
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The Trump administration is still lagging behind the early years of the Obama administration in terms of deportation levels, according to internal Homeland Security figures obtained by Axios.
Though President Donald Trump has sought to ramp up deportations, only 282,242 immigrants have been deported so far in the fiscal year 2019.
In comparison, the Obama administration deported 409,849 immigrants in the fiscal year 2012, though the numbers dropped by nearly half that number by the last years of Obama’s second term in office.
A key factor in Trump’s relatively slow rate of deportations is the limited resources of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Trump on Saturday unexpectedly halted his administration’s plans to round up thousands of migrant families in 10 cities this weekend, saying he would prolong the raids by two weeks to allow Congress time to reform US asylum laws.
Read more: Trump says he will delay ICE raids by two weeks to give lawmakers time to ‘work out a solution’
Yet news reports quickly surfaced, saying that Trump’s goals conflicted with the reality of ICE’s resources. The agency lacks funding and bed space, and the influx of Central American migrant families at the US-Mexico border has required all available funding.
Hundreds of ICE agents have been deployed to the border in recent months, causing a slight dip in immigration arrests in the interior US, The Washington Post reported.
Those interior operations, which typically occur in neighborhoods and workplaces, usually require months of planning, former acting ICE Director John Sandweg told The Post.
“The idea that somehow by just presidential will the agency’s going to go [up] 250 percent to the biggest, largest number of removals in its history is just ridiculous,” Sandweg said.
- Read more:
- This 4-month-old baby was separated from his parents at the border. Now he is nearly 2 and still can’t speak or walk.
- Trump says ‘Obama built the cages’ that his administration has been using to lock up migrant children
- Trump says he ‘brought the families together’ after being confronted in an interview about migrant family separations
- The Trump administration will detain hundreds of migrant children at a military base that was once used as a Japanese internment camp
