The establishment media are suggesting that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is deporting more illegal aliens than former President Donald Trump did, even as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data shows otherwise.
Politico, for example, seemingly credits Biden for Title 42 — the public health order that Trump first used as a border control during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. Biden, in May 2023, ended Title 42.
Though Politico notes that Title 42 expulsions at the United States-Mexico border are different from deportations of illegal aliens from the U.S. interior, the report later conflates the two to claim that Biden and Harris have “kicked out millions more migrants than Trump ever managed to.”
WATCH: NewsNation Drone Footage Shows El Paso Border Day Before Title 42 Ends
NEWSNATION / TMX
A similar suggestion was made in Reuters, where reporters combined migrant returns at the southern border by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) with deportations of illegal aliens living in the U.S. interior by ICE agents to claim that “Biden is now deporting more people than Trump.”
In actuality, ICE deportations of illegal aliens living throughout American cities and towns have plummeted under Biden and Harris. Data that the National Immigration Center for Enforcement (NICE) collected show that while Trump oversaw nearly a million illegal aliens deported from the U.S. interior, Biden and Harris have slashed those deportations in more than half.
We ran the numbers, here are the facts.
Under President Trump, ICE was deporting illegal aliens from American communities at 8 times the rate of Border Czar/Abolish ICE Director Kamala Harris.
The media should be ashamed for spreading Biden-Harris enforcement lies. pic.twitter.com/rFdtOD7mQl
— National Immigration Center for Enforcement (@NICEnforcement) July 29, 2024
“The media is working overtime to cover up Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ record of refusing to deport illegal aliens who arrived on their watch and continue to ravage American communities,” RJ Hauman, president of NICE, told Breitbart News.
“This clear manipulation of the Biden-Harris administration’s own deportation data is so easily debunked,” Hauman continued. “No amount of fawning media coverage can cover for what Biden and Harris have done to the safety and security of our nation.”
Jon Feere, a former ICE official now with the Center for Immigration Studies, writes that the media’s conflating migrant returns at the border with deportations of illegal aliens from the U.S. interior is “a trick that [former President Barack] Obama pulled too” to claim he had deported millions of illegal aliens.
Feere finds that not only are Biden and Harris deporting hundreds of thousands fewer illegal aliens than Trump did but their administration is keeping far more criminal illegal aliens in the U.S., as well:
In comparing the data, I found a 57 percent decrease in arrests of criminal aliens under the Biden administration and a 67 percent decrease in deportations of criminal aliens under the Biden administration. This isn’t a subtle shift in policies; it’s the result of a blatant effort by the Biden administration to allow criminal aliens to remain in the United States. And the data isn’t difficult to locate, so it should be well understood by anyone writing about immigration. [Emphasis added]
The data also shows that there has been a 44 percent decrease in detainer requests issued on criminal aliens by the Biden administration, meaning that the administration is actively choosing to not take thousands of criminal aliens into ICE custody despite the fact that they have been arrested by local law enforcement for criminal violations and could easily be picked up by ICE officers. [Emphasis added]
The Biden-Harris Administration has deported just 4.4% of the over 9.6 million illegals encountered at the border.
Their disastrous policies have effectively turned every state into a border state. https://t.co/QUGoIQm6YL
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 30, 2024
In addition to deporting fewer illegal aliens from the U.S. interior, Biden and Harris have hugely ballooned ICE’s “non-detained docket.” Those migrants on the non-detained docket are known to ICE but are allowed to live throughout the U.S. while awaiting their deportation hearings.
ICE monitors only a tiny fraction of those on the non-detained.
As of June, about 7.4 million migrants were on ICE’s non-detained docket. By the end of 2024, estimates suggest that more than eight million migrants will be on the docket.
This is a massive increase in the non-detained docket from when Trump was in office. For instance, when Trump left office in early 2021, about 3.2 million migrants were on the docket.
“The American people have a clear choice in November — an aggressive enforcer of our immigration laws or a left-wing zealot who served as both ‘Open Border Czar’ and ‘Abolish ICE Director,’” Hauman said.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
