ICE Deportations Hit 10-Year Low

WASHINGTON (January 12, 2017) – The Center for Immigration Studies new report analyzes the FY 2016 enforcement statistics from the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS), released by Department of Homeland Security on the last work day of the calendar year, on the eve of a holiday weekend. The deportation numbers credited to ICE are the lowest since 2006.

Aliens removed from the interior in 2016 have declined 73 percent from 2009, the year President Obama took office; and, unfortunately for community safety, there has been a 60 percent decline from the peak in interior criminal alien removals in 2010.

Unlike in past years, the annual enforcement reports contain only a fraction of the important statistics that traditionally have been published on the work of the immigration agencies. Past numbers allowed observation of historical trends and comparisons that are more difficult to make now.

View the full report at: http://cis.org/ICE-deportations-hit-10-yr-low.

Jessica Vaughan, the Center’s director of policy studies and author or the report, lamented, “DHS discloses few actual statistics now, and even fewer trends. Instead they claim success because most of those removed were 'priorities,' not because the agencies made any headway on the illegal immigration problem. The new reports are of interest only to those who believe that enforcement should be constrained as much as possible. They are of no use to the rest of us who want to know what the DHS agencies actually did all year with taxpayer funds.”

Key Findings

• Deportations credited to ICE in 2016 increased by two percent. All of the increase was in cases of aliens arrested by the Border Patrol, not interior enforcement.
• Interior deportations fell from 69,478 in 2015 to 65,322 in 2016, out of a population of illegal aliens now estimated at 12 million.
• Deportations of criminal aliens fell from 63,127 in 2015 to 60,318 in 2016, out of an estimated population of 2 million criminal aliens.
• The number of deportations under the Obama administration is not easily comparable to prior administrations because of the number of border cases included, but it certainly is not record-breaking, as Obama has claimed. The most deportations occurred under the Clinton administration.
• DHS maintains that CBP arrests have always been a large share of ICE deportations, but in fact this is a new development under the Obama administration. In prior administrations only one-third of deportations credited to ICE were border cases; now about two-thirds are border cases.