Immigration Enforcement Since 9/11: A Reality Check
TRAC offers revealing data on immigrtaion enforcement after September 11, 2001. In the decade since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were created in the wake of 9/11, senior officials in these agencies have repeatedly asserted that their primary enforcement mission was to deport terrorists, persons who threatened the national security and serious criminals from the United States. An examination of millions of case-by-case government records, however, has determined that these frequent claims — made by senior executives under both President Bush and President Obama — are misleading.
Key findings from these government records are:
A decade-by-decade comparison of all removal proceedings initiated in the Immigration Courts seeking to deport individuals from the United States shows substantial growth — from 1.6 million in the decade before 9/11 to 2.3 million in the ten years after. But a comparison of the kinds of deportation proceedings in both the pre-and-post 9/11 periods documents that the actual numbers of those aimed at criminals, national security threats and terrorists have all declined rather than increased. On the other hand, the total number of those charged with purely immigration violations has sharply increased — 1.2 million before the attacks, 1.9 million after.
Deportation proceedings on terrorist or national security grounds, always an extremely rare event, have become even rarer. In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, for example, there were a grand total of 88 matters involving terrorism charges. For the ten years after 9/ll there were 37 such cases.
When examined in terms of the activities of the two administrations, the annual average number of deportation proceedings since 9/11 increased from 219,941 a year under President Bush to 246,572 a year under President Obama. There appears to have been some improvement in targeting, with those charged with criminal immigration violations rising. But these targeting changes have been modest.
KJ