10/9/2014
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
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Numbers debate masks need for comprehensive reform
WASHINGTON D.C. - Depending on whom you believe, President Obama has overseen either a massive surge or a sharp decline in the deportation of undocumented immigrants in 2013.
As it turns out, neither interpretation is correct. Legal scholar Anna O. Law of Brooklyn College writes in the Washington Post that "deportation" isn't a category in immigration law, and it hasn't been since 1996.
Sure enough, when the Department of Homeland Security released its report on "Immigration Enforcement Actions" two weeks ago, the word "deportations" was nowhere to be found. Instead, DHS tracks what it calls "returns" and "removals."
Let's go back to 1996. That's when the distinction between immigrants who were stopped at the border and prevented from entering (a process known as "exclusion") and those who were sent home after being caught on U.S. soil ("deportation") was erased. From that point forward, it didn't matter whether an immigrant was sent home at the border or from somewhere inside the U.S. , both processes became known as "removals" if the immigrant if ordered out of the country by an immigration judge.
That's the key to a removal -- an immigration judge is supposed to review the case and orders the migrant to return home on Uncle Sam's dime. In reality, an increasing number of migrants are removed without seeing a judge at all. A removal can also can mean jail time if migrants try to re-enter the U.S. in the next five to 20 years. In an interview with DecodeDC, Law says a migrant formally removed to Mexico couldn't even return to the U.S. during the time the ban was in place even if he or she married a U.S. citizen.
Immigrants who are "returned," on the other hand, face no legal consequences. They are simply stopped and the border and turned around. They're not finger printed or detained, and there's no threat of prison time if they get caught trying to cross the border again - it could be a day, a week, or years later. As Nora Caplan-Bricker points out in the New Republic, the number of returns has been decreasing since before Obama took office.
Law says groups that use the term "deportation" gloss over the distinction between between "harsher" removals and the "lighter" returns. That's why news organizations and advocacy groups cite such wildly different statistics when they report on immigration.
"When they say 'deportations,' sometimes they mean returns, sometimes they mean removals, and sometimes they mean some combination of both," Law says.
"It's a huge source of confusion," says Marc Rosenblum of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. "For groups that have an advocacy agenda, it's easy to misrepresent enforcement trends by giving an apples to oranges comparison."
When immigrant rights groups call Obama the "Deporter-in-Chief", they're looking at the number of people who have been subject to removals -- sent back to their home countries with a 5-, 10- or 20-year ban on entering the U.S. again, legally or illegally. The number of removals each year has been increasing nearly every year since 2002 -- before Obama took office.
When critics on the right say the president has been too lax on immigration, they're looking at the combined number of returns and removals, which has been declining since 2004 due to a reduction in returns.
Law argues it's impossible to compare the return and removal rates of different presidents, because each administration sets slightly different guidelines for what kinds of cases get which label. She's also frustrated by what she says is the Department of Homeland Security's inability to keep data that's reliably comparable over time.
"There's something wrong when you've thoroughly confused experts in the field," Law says. As long as news organizations and advocacy groups keep obscuring the facts by talking about nonexistent "deportations," Law says Congress can continue to spin the numbers and postpone action.
All the confusion over terminology and the mud-slinging it helps perpetuate have overshadowed what Rosenblum says are some significant shifts in the immigration enforcement landscape.
The overall number of apprehensions at the border continues to decline, the share of removals versus returns is up, and a much higher percentage of those removals are the result of non-judicial processes where migrants don't have the chance to plead their case before a judge.
In a report released in April, Rosenblum and his Migration Policy Institute colleagues argued that the debate over who is being sent home and how masks the need for updated, comprehensive legislation on immigration. Brooklyn College's Law says that's not likely anytime soon.
"There's benefit for both parties not doing anything because you're going to make someone angry," she says. "Why not just kick this can down the road until you absolutely have to act."
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