Obama's Deportation Rate Hits Record Low - NOT Record High!

From Ernest Istook --  

Although the Obama administration claims deportations have hit an all-time high, they’ve actually hit record lows, covered-up by a shell game of phony numbers, said Jessica Vaughan, the Center for Immigration Studies’ director of Policy Studies.

Ms. Vaughan’s report went viral Monday morning about how 68,000 convicted criminals were released by immigration officials last year rather than deported. She revealed the bigger bombshell about phony deportation numbers during her interview on my talk radio show Monday afternoon on The Washington Times Radio Network.

The true number of deportations in 2013 was 135,000, the lowest since 1973, she told me — only one third of the 400,000 that is often claimed.

“These numbers show that the president is hardly the deporter-in-chief as so many of the ethnic advocacy groups have tried to paint him,” she told me. “A better title would be releaser-in-chief … because ICE is now releasing more illegal aliens than they are trying to deport when their agents find them in the interior of the country.”

How do they manipulate the numbers?

She described a cover-up that substitutes numbers from the Border Patrol — which apprehends those who have newly crossed our borders — and using them to pump up ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which is supposed to apprehend and deport violators from the interior. Those apprehended by the Border Patrol are transferred to ICE custody just before being returned to their country of origin, enabling ICE to claim a statistic but without having to enforce the laws in the heartland.

“It’s really just a shell game of numbers,” Ms. Vaughan said. “But the kind of enforcement that most people would notice, which is in our communities, has gone down very dramatically in the last couple of years”

And how about the 68,000 convicted criminals who ICE had in their custody — but then released last year?

“Crime is not a job Americans won’t do,” she said. Yet, “people who have committed crimes here are being sent back to our communities when they should be sent home to their countries. These policies create real victims.”

ICE’s official internal reports unfortunately do not detail the specific offenses involved, but Ms. Vaughan said ICE chooses to treat as lesser offenses certain assaults, vandalism, sex crimes, and DUI’s. She described those drunken drivers as “a serious hazard on the roadways but not being taken seriously by immigration officials … until you get to three convictions or more.”

For someone killed or injured by a drunk driver, that’s three convictions too late.

The entire interview with Jessica Vaughan is available in the podcast of my March 31st show, and is on The Washington Times’ radio page: http://www.washingtontimes.com/radio/

Ernest Istook spent 25 years in public office, including 14 years in Congress. He was rated one of the top 25 conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives. Then was a Heritage Foundation fellow and a fellow at Harvard’s Insitute of Politics, where he led a study group on Propaganda in American Politics Today.