TRUMP: “We’re getting gang members out, we’re getting drug lords out, we’re getting really bad dudes out of this country, at a rate nobody has ever seen before. … It’s a military operation because what has been allowed to come into our country, when you see gang violence that you’ve read about like never before and all of the things, much of that is people who are here illegally. And they’re rough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people. So we’re getting them out.”
THE FACTS: Trump is broadly embellishing his brief track record on immigration and wrongly branding the deportation effort a military operation.
The number of people expelled from the country since Trump took office on Jan. 20 has not been released. No available data supports his claim that immigrants in the country illegally are being expelled at a rate “nobody has ever seen before.” Deportations were brisk when Barack Obama was president.
Altogether in January, 16,643 people were deported, a drop from December (20,395) but a number that is similar to monthly deportations in early 2015 and 2016.
This month, Homeland Security officials have said 680 people were arrested in a weeklong effort to find and arrest criminal immigrants living in the United States illegally. Three-quarters of those people had been convicted of crimes, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said. The remaining 25 percent were not. The government has not provided information about who was arrested in that roundup, so it’s impossible to determine how many gang members or drug lords were in that group.
That effort was largely planned before Trump took office and was alternately described by the administration as a routine enforcement effort and a signal of Trump’s pledge to take a harder line on illegal immigration. During the Obama administration similar operations were carried out that yielded thousands of arrests.
The 680 arrests were not carried out in a military operation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responsible for finding and deporting immigrants in the country illegally, is a civilian law enforcement agency.
Trump plans to increase enforcement, but Kelly contradicted him on Thursday over the nature of that initiative:
“There will be no use of military forces in immigration,” Kelly said while visiting Mexico. “There will be no — repeat, no — mass deportations.”
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