President Donald Trump made a promise with his mass deportation plan: First, we’ll remove the “criminals.” In doing so, he framed his fear-fueled immigration enforcement overdrive as a purge for public safety. But the evidence—from reports on the ground, available data, and precedent—points to a different direction: Immigration raids’ numbers boosted by the arrest of immigrants who haven’t committed crimes.
“There is no way for the Trump administration to achieve any of its enforcement goals,” Austin Kocher, who researches immigration enforcement, notes, “without targeting immigrants with no criminal histories.” And that’s exactly what is happening. NBC News and NPR recently reported on scores of immigrants without criminal histories have been arrested.
From the beginning, the idea of deporting “millions and millions of criminal aliens” was deceiving. For starters, there aren’t that many deportable undocumented immigrants with criminal records in the country. (Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens.) Of the 7.6 million immigrants on ICE’s national docket for potential deportation that the agency reported last year only about 8 percent had a conviction or pending charges. The most common offenses? Traffic-related, according to ICE’s data.
To deliver on the campaign promise of the largest deportation operation in US history, the Trump administration has had to scale up and juke the stats. On January 27, Trump called for a “massive increase” in immigration detention capacity and a “record investment” in interior enforcement, including deportation flights. “We’re getting them all out,” Trump said in a speech from his Doral resort outside of Miami, Florida. “I won on that.”
By them Trump meant criminals being returned to Colombia. He said “every one of them [is] either a murderer or a drug lord, a kingpin of some kind, the head of the mob or a gang member.” But this was not true. As it turns out, the 200 or so immigrants flown on two planes back to the South American country last week had no criminal history, according to Colombian officials. “They’re not criminals,” then-foreign minister Luis Gilberto Murillo said in a video statement. He added: “Being a migrant is not a crime.”
How has the White House squared this? By labeling all undocumented immigrants criminals, even though unlawful presence in the country is a civil, not criminal, violation. When asked for the number of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests conducted so far that have specifically targeted immigrants with criminal records, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “All of them,” adding “because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and, therefore, they are criminals.”
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