When Barack Obama was the deporter-in-chief, he wasn’t just criticized by left-wing activists who found his approach to illegal immigration too harsh. Many who did want to see these numbers used to justify a future amnesty accused the Obama administration of cooking the books to make the deportation numbers look better than they were.
Obama, facing competing pressures inside the Democratic Party on the issue of immigration, acknowledged as much himself when speaking to Hispanic journalists late in his first term. “The statistics are actually a little deceptive because what we’ve been doing is, with the stronger border enforcement, we’ve been apprehending folks at the borders and sending them back. That is counted as a deportation, even though they may have only been held for a day or 48 hours, sent back—that’s counted as a deportation,” he said.
Similar charges were leveled against former President Joe Biden’s administration when the press started hyping election-year deportations after a more than three-year crisis at the southern border.
Past lies, damned lies, and statistics come to mind as President Donald Trump seeks to deport at least 1 million illegal immigrants by the end of the first year of his second term. Trump has an unmistakable mandate to get immigration and the border under control.
All of these things are related, in fact. Obama sought, especially in his first term, to build enforcement credibility to help him eventually pass “comprehensive immigration reform” that would amnesty a large majority of illegal immigrants already in the United States. Biden, like many liberals of circa 2020, decided he did not want to repeat his former boss’s deportations as he was then vying to lead a party whose activists increasingly rejected the right of wealthy Western governments to control migration from developing countries much at all.
Biden’s failure to enforce the border led to record illegal immigration (coupled with a major surge in immigration generally) and helped wreck his presidency. Even deep-blue cities far from the border struggled to cope with the inflows. After Biden and sidekick Kamala Harris, the vice president occasionally known as the border czar, the public was willing to back Trump for a second term on a platform of mass deportations (according to some polls, at least).
That’s further than many voters were willing to go pre-Biden, much as a critical mass of Democrats lost their minds on immigration during Trump’s first term.
If the Trump administration gets close to the goal of 1 million deportations but doesn’t quite reach it, we can probably expect some Obama- and Biden-like gaming of the numbers. The current president is surely unhappy with the deportation numbers so far and the unflattering headlines they generate. (Though the Trump deportations that do occur are hardly celebrated by these same media outlets.)
At the same time, there can be little doubt that the Trump team is serious about controlling immigration and wants to deport as many illegal aliens as practically possible. That could lead to excesses in the opposite direction, as perhaps people get swept up in the mass deportations who should not be. (It is not clear that Abrego Garcia entirely fits that description or that he can be successfully used to discredit Trump’s immigration crackdown politically.)
Most polls show the public approves of the job Trump is doing on immigration after the previous four years of failure. In February, illegal border crossings were down 94 percent compared to February 2024.
“The media and our friends in the Democrat Party kept saying we needed new legislation,” Trump said in a speech to Congress last month. “‘We must have legislation to secure the border.’ But it turned out that all we really needed was a new president.”
At the same time, instead of chasing deportation records it might be better to look at a different number—How many illegal immigrants are there in the country?—and ask whether Trump is reducing it. This might be an even more difficult thing to reliably measure than the deportation numbers, which the federal government tracks. But it is a big part of the point of any sane immigration policy.
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There are a whole host of things the Trump administration is doing to communicate to would-be illegal immigrants that they are not welcome and stand a greater risk of being sent home than under the previous administration. These range from big things, like various enforcement measures being undertaken in a high-profile way, to small ones, like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s widely panned videos (even if the latter are a bit overdone).
These can both deter future illegal immigration and get undocumented immigrants already here to leave in ways that don’t raise the same due-process concerns as the deportations.
By all means, deport illegal immigrants, and especially criminal aliens. But Trump should keep his eyes on the prize.
