Obama’s Deportations
Snopes claims that “immigration authorities deported more than 3 million people during the Obama administration” based on “formal removal” data “reported by the DHS.”
IN FACT, Obama’s DHS Secretary, Jeh Johnson, stated in a 2014 hearing that “under the Obama administration more than half of those removals that were attributed to ICE were actually a result of Border Patrol arrests. They wouldn’t have been counted in prior administrations.”
Far from being the “Deporter-in-Chief,” Obama enacted several policies to limit deportations, including an attempt to unilaterally make 4-to-5 million illegal immigrants immune from deportation and eligible for Social Security and Medicare if they had a child who was a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. This action was struck down (2–1) by a federal appeals court.
The fatal flaw of Snopes’ analysis is that it conflates “removals” with “deportations.” Based on this false equivalence, media outlets have inflated Biden’s deportation figures by 5 times and falsely reported that Biden deported more illegal immigrants than Trump in both his first term and at the pace of his current one.
