President Trump claims that his administration will quickly deport “millions and millions” of “illegal aliens” with criminal records.
Those millions of criminal immigrants don’t exist.
Less than 1% of immigrants deported last fiscal year were kicked out of the U.S. for crimes other than immigration violations. In the past 40 years, federal officials have documented about 425,000 noncitizens with criminal convictions on the ICE’s “non-detained docket.”
About 13,100 of those were convicted in homicides and are imprisoned in the U.S. They’ll have deportation hearings after serving their sentences.
To deport millions of “criminals,” Trump would have to consider all undocumented immigrants as criminals. But being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one.
Those millions would have to include agricultural, construction and service workers, students and others who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. but have no criminal backgrounds, according to legal specialists and an Axios review of federal immigration data.
Unauthorized immigrants caught near the border can be quickly removed.
But any convicted immigrants serving time — or those charged with crimes — will face deportation hearings only after the U.S. criminal justice system is done with them.
In his inauguration speech, Trump previewed the executive orders on immigration restrictions he later signed, repeating his false claim that the nation is plagued by millions of undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
“All entry illegal will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” he said.
His surrogates have repeated that claim, adding that Trump’s mass deportation plan would begin by prioritizing dangerous criminals — something the federal government has been doing since the Clinton administration.
Less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the last fiscal year — involving about 8,400 people — included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found.
Immigrants arrested in homicides accounted for less than 1% of “at-large” arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the last six years.
At-large arrests are those made in public settings, as opposed to when ICE agents pick up someone who’s already behind bars.
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