U.S. “Cooks the Books” To Show Record No. Of Deportations

The Obama Administration is skewing figures to show that it has deported a record number of illegal immigrants and, not surprisingly, the mainstream media has bought it hook, line and sinker.

A number of media reports have quoted the administration’s inflated deportation stats, but the House Judiciary Committee is setting the record straight after obtaining internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents that tell a different story. The files show that the administration is cooking the books to make it seem as if deportations are at an all-time high when in fact they have decreased significantly.

It turns out that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is unscrupulously including numbers from a special program that technically should not count for deportations. It’s called the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) and it’s a joint effort between ICE and Customs and Border Protection that transfers illegal aliens apprehended at the southern border back to Mexico.

It’s illegitimate to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol under this program as ICE removals, the House Judiciary Committee says. There are no penalties or bars attached when illegal immigrants are sent back south via ATEP and they can simply attempt re-entry, the committee further points out. In many cases they do.

When ATEP removals are subtracted from ICE’s recent, “record” deportation numbers, the 2011 removal total would drop from approximately 397,000 to roughly 360,000 and the 2012 removal total would drop from about 334,000 to around 263,000 (annualized this is estimated to be a drop from about 400,000 to 315,000).  This means that ICE removals for this year will be about 14% below 2008 (369,000) and 19% below 2009 (389,000).

The internal records reviewed by the congressional committee also reveal a discrepancy between arrests and actual removals.  Specifically, ICE has reported 221,656 arrests yet report 334,249 removals for 2012 so far – a discrepancy of nearly 112,000 removals.  ATEP accounts for 72,030 removals within this discrepancy, but there are more than 40,000 removals that remain unaccounted for. 

The documents clearly show that President Obama and other administration officials have “falsified” records to achieve historic deportation numbers, according to the Texas congressman who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, Lamar Smith. “It’s bad enough that the President has neglected to enforce our immigration laws but it’s even worse that his Administration would distort statistics to deceive the American people,” Smith said.

The mainstream media tells a much different story, consistently reporting that a record number of foreigners were deported in 2011. One major newspaper went so far as to predict that the record deportations are on track for this year, even as the numbers of migrants crossing the border illegally dropped to a 40-year low. The same story highlighted that an “all-time high” number of removals were convicted criminals.