Following in the footsteps

Trump is doing the deportations thing just as he said he would, but the reporting reveals that the Biden and Obama administrations did plenty of deporting themselves. It’s not clear to me that Trump is doing anything radically different.

A cornerstone of Trump’s immigration policy is removing unlawful migrants out of the US and the promise of “mass deportations”. To that effect, the defence department has said that it will provide military aircrafts to deport more than 5,000 people [who] have been detained by Border Patrol in San Diego and El Paso, Texas.

ICE statistics show that over 1,000 people were removed or repatriated on Thursday, the fourth day of the Trump administration.

Deportations are not unique to the Trump administration. Biden carried out deportations as well, with 271,000 immigrants deported to 192 countries in fiscal year 2024.

In total, Biden carried out 1.5 million deportations in his four years, according to figures by the Migration Policy Institute. That is around the same that was carried out under Trump’s first term. That number is lower than deportations carried out under Barack Obama’s first term, which added up to a total of 2.9 million.

Aka twice as many. Obama deported nearly twice as many as Trump in their respective first terms.

I gotta say, the reporting hasn’t always reflected that fact.

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