In April, the Los Angeles Times
wrote:
A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data. Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.
And last week, Julia Preston of the New York Times
reported that
in the fiscal year 2013, the immigration courts saw a 26 percent drop in the number of people who have been deported, thereby producing:
… a different picture of President Obama’s enforcement policies than the one painted by many immigrant advocates, who have assailed the president as the ‘deporter in chief’ and accused him of rushing to reach a record of 2 million deportations. While Obama has deported more foreigners than any other president, the pace of deportations has recently declined.
Somehow, the Obama administration is simultaneously responsible for the highest rate of deportation in 20 years and a 26 percent drop in deportation. What is going on here? As it turns out, changes in immigration law, terminology and classification are causing this confusion.
One problem is the continued use of “
deportation” in virtually all media reporting. In actuality,
that category has been obsolete in immigration law since 1996. Prior to 1996, immigration law distinguished between immigrants who were “excluded,” or stopped and prevented from entering U.S. territory, and those who were “deported,” or expelled from the United States after they had made their way into U.S. territory.
After 1996, both exclusion and deportation were rolled into one procedure called “removal.” At that point, the term “deportation” no longer had any meaning within the official immigration statistics. Its continued use in media reports is part of the confusion.
The large number of immigrants who are apprehended, usually but not exclusively along the southwestern border, and prevented from entering the country were part of a category called “voluntary departure” before 2006. Now that is called “return,” which also includes the subcategory of “reinstatement.” There is also a large category of “expedited removals” of persons that do not appear before an immigration judge but the procedure carries all the sanctions as a judge ordered removal.
These
would-be immigrants accept this sanction that forgoes a court appearance before an immigration judge because formal removal — in which the U.S. government runs them through legal proceedings and pays for their return to their home country — would result in a multi-year bar (five to 20 years) on their eligibility to legally reenter the United States. Critics deride this policy “as catch and release.”
The consequences of a return are much less harsh than a formal removal because the returned immigrant could come back legally, and presumably illegally, at any time.