I am not even sure what the benefit for a pro-immigration politician would be in falsifying a greater number of deportees....The Obama administration is fudging the numbers in claims it is deporting "record" numbers of illegal aliens, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee reported last week.
The committee, led by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas, pictured), accused the administration of inflating the numbers by including illegal aliens apprehended at the border in the total of those deported.
Observers have noted the oddity of the president touting his administration's deportations, given that his immigration deputies have flatly stated that they will not deport illegal immigrants who meet the criteria of the failed DREAM Act, a position Obama himself made official in June, when he announced that young illegals were free to stay in the country.
The Numbers
The committee put the numbers together with documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They "show that the Obama administration is cooking the books to achieve their so-called 'record' deportation numbers for illegal immigrants and that removals are actually significantly down — not up — from 2009," the committee reported in a release.
Obama began cooking the books last year, the committee reported:
Beginning in 2011, the Committee has learned that Obama administration officials at the Department of Homeland Security started to include numbers from the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) in its year-end removal numbers.
The ATEP is a joint effort between ICE and Customs and Border Protection that transfers illegal immigrants apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border to another point along the Southwest border for removal. But it is illegitimate to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the Southwest border as ICE removals. There are no penalties or bars attached when illegal immigrants are sent back via ATEP and they can simply attempt re-entry.
Pulling out the ATEP numbers dramatically changes the number of deportations under Obama. The numbers for 2012 are nearly 20 percent below those in 2009. The committee continued,
When ATEP removals are subtracted from ICE's 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 documents 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 over 40,000 removals that remain unaccounted for.
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