U'S. - Overall Deportations Drop in 2015, 27% for Criminal Aliens.

U'S. - Overall Deportations Drop in 2015, 27% for Criminal Aliens. HT: Judicial watch.

A year after freeing tens of thousands of illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is distorting annual deportation figures by falsely claiming the number of criminal aliens removed from the U.S. keeps increasing when in fact it’s shrinking drastically.

In fiscal year 2015 deportation figures released this week, DHS celebrates that its enforcement efforts prioritize criminals and threats to public safety as well as national security. The agency created after 9/11 to keep the country safe claims the latest stats show “the number of convicted criminals removed from the interior continued to increase.”

The reality is that deportations of criminal aliens declined 27% from last year—from 86,923 in 2014 to 63,127 in 2015. This serious discrepancy was exposed by the Washington D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which further reveals that the number of criminal deportations in fiscal year 2015 is less than half of what it was in 2011.

Immigration enforcement remains in a state of collapse, according to the official statistics released by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today.

• Total deportations by ICE (including both border and interior cases) declined 25% from last year, from 315,943 in 2014 to 235,413 in 2015.
• Interior deportations by ICE declined 31% from last year, from 100,114 in 2014 to 69,478 in 2015.
• Most concerning, deportations of criminal aliens from the interior declined 27% from last year, from 86,923 in 2014 to 63,127 in 2015.

The number of interior deportations is now less than one-third of what it was in 2011, before the Obama administration implemented policy changes that greatly restricted the types of cases that ICE officers and agents could pursue for deportation. The number of criminal alien deportations from the interior is less than half of what it was in 2011.




ICE Director Sarah Saldana said that she was "proud of the numbers" when she testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on December 2, 2015.

In a press release announcing the numbers today, DHS falsely says "the number of convicted criminals removed from the interior continued to increase." In fact, only the share of deportations that are of criminals has increased – the actual number has fallen, as noted above. Read the full story here.