AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The Trump administration continues its aggressive campaign to detain and deport immigrants in the U.S. illegally. Multiple cities are at the center of these efforts, including Chicago and Los Angeles. Now the Department of Homeland Security says the crackdown, which started shortly after President Trump took office, has resulted in the removal of more than half a million undocumented immigrants so far. To fact-check these numbers and put them in context, we're joined now by NPR's Sergio Martínez-Beltrán. Welcome, Sergio.
SERGIO MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN, BYLINE: Hi, Ayesha.
RASCOE: So where does that figure - 500,000 people deported - come from, and is it accurate?
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Well, the pace of deportations has clearly increased by a lot under Trump, but it's not clear that this half-million figure is accurate. This number comes from a DHS-issued press release, but it did not provide any evidence or additional information. Now, NPR repeatedly requested data from DHS to support that claim, and they have not yet responded.
RASCOE: Is it unusual for administrations to have this kind of lack of transparency on immigration figures?
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: So administrations typically provide some evidence to back their deportation numbers, even if it's just annually. Look, ICE collects a lot of data on every person it arrests, detains, transports and deports. But this administration is not releasing all of that information. They have released some detention numbers that show people at a given time in immigration facilities, but they have not released a breakdown of deportation numbers.
I talked to Dara Lind with the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. She has compared these latest DHS deportation numbers to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley and UCLA. That data she looked at is through June, and Lind says there is a significant gap.
DARA LIND: They definitely are engaging in more removals in the data that we have toward the end of that period than at the beginning. We're still looking at fewer than 7,500 removals a week. That's a lot of people. It's a lot of people, but it's nowhere near the number that you would need to have gotten to 500,000.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: Even if they have kept up that high rate of 7,500 deportations a week, that would have totaled 300,000 in the first 10 months of this administration. And as Lind says, that's way short of its aggressive goal of deporting 1 million undocumented immigrants every year. The administration also says that more than 1.6 million undocumented immigrants have left the country on their own this year. But again, they have not provided any data to back that up.
RASCOE: The Trump administration regularly claims that the vast majority of those detained - 70% - are criminals charged with or convicted of a crime in the U.S. Here's DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin recently on Fox News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRICIA MCLAUGHLIN: We have 10,000 new ICE enforcement officers that are going to be hired in the coming days, so we know that we're going to continue to arrest the worst of the worst off of the streets of America's sanctuary cities and across the nation.
RASCOE: So, Sergio, worst of the worst, 70% criminals - is this accurate?
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: No. Not really, Ayesha. According to DHS' own detention data, 53% of immigration detainees had either pending charges or a conviction. The rest had no criminal record. And it's important to note that the 53% includes violations like property theft and traffic violations. One report in June from the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute found that only about 7% of the people booked by ICE had serious or violent convictions. The other 93% either did not have a violent conviction or any convictions at all. Here's Dara Lind again with the American Immigration Council.
LIND: They don't see a particularly strong difference between people who have committed very serious crimes and people who have no contact with the criminal justice system whatsoever but who are in the U.S. without documentation.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: For context, two things to keep in mind here - first, entering the country illegally, coming in without documentation, is often a misdemeanor. And once in the U.S., if a migrant gets picked up without papers, that is often a civil offense.
RASCOE: That's NPR's Sergio Martínez-Beltrán. Thank you so much for joining us.
MARTÍNEZ-BELTRÁN: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
