The Amnesty Lobby's Deportation Lie

Vox.com, the new for-profit messaging arm of the Democratic Party, has a story up with the headline, "Obama is deporting more immigrants than any president in history: explained." This is a flat out lie and the Obama administration has admitted it under oath.

Vox.com propagandist Dara Lind writes, "President Obama is going to leave the White House having deported more immigrants than any other president in history — at least 2 million deportations to date."

But what Lind fails to mention is that Obama is completely cooking the books to arrive at those numbers. The Los Angeles Times explains:

Until recent years, most people caught illegally crossing the southern border were simply bused back into Mexico in what officials called "voluntary returns," but which critics derisively termed "catch and release." Those removals, which during the 1990s reached more 1 million a year, were not counted in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation statistics.

Now, the vast majority of border crossers who are apprehended get fingerprinted and formally deported. ... In the Obama years, all of the increase in deportations has involved people picked up within 100 miles of the border, most of whom have just recently crossed over. In 2013, almost two-thirds of deportations were in that category.

But don't take the LA Times word for it. Just look at Obama's own Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Jonhson. Asked by Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), "Under the Obama administration, more than half of those removals that were attributed to ICE are actually a result of Border Patrol arrests that wouldn't have been counted in prior administrations," Johnson replied, "Correct."

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So if we use the same definition of "deportation" for each president, than Land's entire thesis falls apart: Obama is not "deporting more immigrants than any president in history." In fact, he is deporting less. Again from the LAT:

A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data.

Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.

So the truth is actually 100 percent the opposite of what Vox "reported."