In the past 12 months, President Barack Obama’s administration has deported the fewest number of immigrants since taking office on 2005, Fox News Latino reports.
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Obama has seen the removal of over $2.4 million immigrants since he took office. Total deportations fell by 42% since 2010.
Coming as another surprise, the past year also saw a decline in the number of criminal deportations, despite the president insisting that he’d be cracking down on expulsions of those with “serious criminal records”. She attributed the plummet to the surge of children crossing the border and uncooperative local and foreign governments.
The Homeland Security Department has not yet publicly disclosed the new internal figures, which include month-by-month breakdowns and cover the period between October 1, 2014, and September 28.
The data found by the AP also points to another trend: The number of criminal deportations has declined, despite Obama’s 2012 campaign pledge to focus on deporting immigrants with criminal backgrounds or who pose a threat to society.
The overall total of 231,000 deportations generally does not include Mexicans who were caught at the border and quickly returned home by the U.S. Border Patrol.
About 11 million undocumented immigrants are thought to be living in the US, which amounts to roughly 3.5 percent of the nation’s population, according to Pew. That process is more expensive, complicated and time-consuming, especially when immigrants fight their deportation or seek asylum in the United States.
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“The deportation laws were interpreted and enforced, you know, very aggressively, during the last six and a half years, which I think his administration did in part to try to get Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform”, Clinton said in the weekend interview. These people do not appear on any formal list of repatriated immigrants or immigrants found just across the border. It was the first time that immigrants from other countries outnumbered those from Mexico.
