Trump on Deportations: Do What Obama Has Done but ‘With More Energy’

Do what Obama is doing with deportations but “perhaps with a lot more energy.”

That, according to the Washington Post, is Republican candidate for president Donald Trump’s latest proposal for deportations of illegal immigrants.

But is that really what he said? Since Trump likes to accuse the media of twisting his words and positions, let’s take a closer look.

“What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with Bill O’Reilly Monday night. “Bush, the same thing. Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.”

It certainly sounds like taking Obama’s lead on deportations is Trump’s game plan.

Mr. Trump is repeating an oft cited statistic about deportations that Conservative Review’s Robert Eno debunked back in December. The claim goes that President Obama has deported more illegal immigrants than Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

That’s false, because when one accounts for deportations, which the federal government calls “removals” and also for “returns,” a word the government uses for “voluntary deportations,” one finds that the number of illegal immigrants that have actually left the country has sharply declined under President Obama’s oversight.

So what has President Obama done?

Overall deportations have dropped by nearly two-thirds since 2011. As Conservative Review Senior Editor Daniel Horowitz wrote last December:

Since Obama began his amnesty programs in 2011, deportations have dropped to less than one-third their annual level prior to Obama’s suspension of congressional statutes. What about criminal aliens? Wasn’t the purpose of amnesty to focus just on criminal aliens? They also plummeted by almost 60%.

Trump sometimes says he wants to crack down on criminal aliens through deportations.

“The first thing we’re going to do if and when I win is we’re going to get rid of all of the bad ones,” Trump said. “We’ve got gang members, we have killers, we have a lot of bad people that have to get out of this country. We’re going to get them out, and the police know who they are. They’re known by law enforcement who they are. We don’t do anything. They go around killing people and hurting people, and they’re going to be out of this country so fast your head will spin. We have existing laws that allow you to do that.”

The problem is President Obama’s administration claims they already do this, using the “existing laws” Trump cited.

Mr. Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton has said the same thing, pledging to deport violent criminals and terrorists.

Now, President Obama’s administration has claimed a policy of “felons, not families” regarding their targeting of violent criminal illegal aliens for deportations. Yet the Center for Immigration Studies has noted that deportations of “criminal aliens” declined 27% from 86,923 in 2014 to 63,127 in 2015.

So when Mr. Trump says he would continue the current policy, the policy he’s talking about is deporting less criminal aliens. And he doesn’t seem to realize that.

Further, President Obama has invited more people to enter into the country illegally through his policies as well. Executive orders on amnesty aside, the Obama administration has gone as far as spend $9 million to provide attorneys at taxpayer expense to 2,600 illegal immigrant children who had surged over the border in 2014.

Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he would “do the same thing” as President Obama in regards to deportations and illegal immigration is anathema to Trump’s own stated desire to crack down on criminal aliens and secure the border.

Even Democratic President Bill Clinton took a stronger position on illegal immigration in his 1995 State of the Union address than Obama would ever consider.

President Bill Clinton deported four times as many illegal immigrants as President Obama. If Mr. Trump is going to follow a Democrat’s lead on deportations, shouldn’t he talk about his opponent Hillary Clinton’s own husband’s policies? (For more from the author of “Trump on Deportations: Do What Obama Has Done but ‘With More Energy'” please click HERE)

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