Trump Deportation Numbers On The Rise, But Still Lower Than Barack Obama’s
Cracking down on illegal immigration and building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border was one of Donald Trump’s key campaign promises. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, Trump is currently waging a political war against the Democratic Party, threatening a government shutdown if Congress doesn’t approve funding for the wall.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer appears to have bowed to the president’s pressure, promising on November 29 to fund — not a “physical wall,” he claims — but fencing and other border security measures. Adamant to get funding for the expensive project, Donald Trump appears to have caused a stalemate situation in Congress, sowing division within the Democratic Party as border-state Democrats push back against Schumer’s compromise.
Although in line with his notoriously anti-immigration rhetoric, Trump’s dedication to fulfill one of his key campaign promises momentarily appears overshadowed by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s latest report, which shows that Trump is trailing Barack Obama. As PolitiFact noted, Trump vowed to deport 11 million “illegal immigrants” during a 2016 presidential debate.
Writing about ICE’s latest reports, the Washington Post observed that the United States, under Donald Trump, deported more than 256,000 individuals in 2018, while Barack Obama deported 409,849 in 2012. Although evidently ineffective, Donald Trump’s policies have “created a society of fear and terror” in immigrant communities, according to deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center Mary Bauer.
“It used to be that there was a sense that they were looking for people who had committed serious crimes. We know the kinds of criminal violations that send people into the deportation machine. People are there in large number because of minor traffic violations.”
It also appears that Donald Trump’s hard-line rhetoric — which has obviously failed to translate to action — continues to paint the president as substantially tougher on immigration than Obama, although ICE’s official reports suggest the opposite. Even Barack Obama himself, according to the Daily Beast, described Trump’s border “stunts” as “racist,” amid intense media revolt against the Republican president’s insistence on tough immigration policies.
Deportations under Trump are on the rise but still lower than Obama’s, ICE report shows https://t.co/UuEg59mAQb
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) December 15, 2018
The white noise created by Donald Trump’s apparent volatility toward immigrants appears to have obfuscated the fact that Obama had built what the Guardian describes as a “deportation machine.”
“Rather than fighting their extreme policy initiatives, the establishment built the right a monstrous deportation machinery that could now be used to utterly monstrous ends – which, frankly, is how they’ve been used all along,” columnist Daniel Denvir wrote.
Infamously labeled “Deporter-in-Chief” by immigration groups, Barack Obama has deported more people than any other president in United States history, according to ABC News, so it is safe to assume that Donald Trump has quite a bit of catching up to do. Thus far, according to ICE’s latest report, the president has failed.
