Donald Trump is deporting fewer people than Barack Obama did

ON THE morning of October 4th Gwen and Rossyo Barrios Mendoza, two teenage sisters, were scurrying around their family’s small home in Santa Ana. They ate cereal, fed the chickens and got their bags ready for school while their four siblings snoozed. Then they waved goodbye to their father, Israel, as he backed his grey pickup truck out onto their sunny street and began driving towards the building site where he worked as a house-framer. A minute or two later Gwen received a call. It was her father, and his voice sounded shaky: “Gwen—I’ve been arrested. They’re going to leave my truck on the street around the corner. Have your mom come get it.”

Mr Barrios Mendoza is now being held in a detention centre in the Joshua tree-studded California high desert. His children, all six of whom were born in America, had worried about something like this happening to their father, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, ever since Donald Trump was elected president. While campaigning, Mr Trump had promised to “round up” and remove all 11m undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in America. It was an impossible vow to keep, but the country still braced for an onslaught of deportations.

Yet figures released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on December 5th show that the total number of deportations has declined over the past fiscal year—from October 1st 2016 to September 30th 2017—to the lowest level seen since 2006. The data also show that deportation has become less selective in the Trump era, increasing the risk of removal for people like Mr Barrios Mendoza, who have led long and quiet lives in America.

The decrease in total deportations is largely explained by a 17% drop in the number of immigrants arrested and removed at the border over the past fiscal year. Recent border crossers are the easiest to deport; those found within 100 miles (161km) of the frontier who have been in America 14 days or fewer are not entitled to make their case before an immigration judge, a process that can take months, if not years, in the backlogged courts. DHS officials credit tighter border security and more stringent interior enforcement with dissuading migrants from making the risky trek across America’s southern frontier. Mr Trump’s harsh rhetoric probably served as a deterrent, but border apprehensions, which are often used as a proxy for illegal immigration, began declining before he moved into the Oval Office.

While border removals have dipped, deportations of immigrants arrested in the interior of the country have increased by a quarter over the past fiscal year, due to Mr Trump’s expansion of who is considered eligible for removal. In February the DHS issued new immigration enforcement guidelines that are far broader than those implemented under Barack Obama.

During the second half of Mr Obama’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were asked to focus on arresting newly arrived immigrants and undocumented immigrants with felony convictions. Mr Barrios Mendoza, whose only scrape with the law was a ticket for driving without a licence (which his migration status prevented him getting), may not have been entirely safe from deportation, but he would not have been an active target. “Felons, not families,” Mr Obama summarised when announcing the priorities. Statistics presented by ICE in 2016, Mr Obama’s final year in office, suggested that 83.7% of immigrants deported that year constituted threats to public safety, or had been apprehended at the border when trying to cross illegally.

The Trump administration’s guidelines are far more sweeping. ICE officers are to focus not just on immigrants with criminal convictions, but even on those with unsettled criminal charges. The instructions do not distinguish between violent crimes and more minor infractions, such as traffic offences or immigration crimes, which include crossing into America without permission. “The Department no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement,” read the DHS memo of February. At a recent press conference Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, put it more bluntly: “There is no prerequisite that you commit yet another crime to enforce immigration law. You know the IRS enforces tax law, we enforce immigration law. That’s our job.”

Despite casting a wider net, Randy Capps of the Migration Policy Institute, a think-tank, does not expect DHS to increase deportation numbers unless it can quickly add more ICE officers. The number of undocumented people arrested each week in the interior of the country has not increased much since February, suggesting that the agency may be at capacity. Detention centres, where populations are overflowing, present another limiting factor. In October DHS began exploring the possibility of opening five new detention centres, but such facilities would take time to find or build and congressionally appropriated dollars to run. The fact that deportations are unlikely to increase much is of little comfort to the Barrios Mendoza children, whose mother has taken to selling home-made tamales to pay the rent while their father sits in detention.