 |
|
New data crunched by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, which uses the federal Freedom of Information Act to collect massive amounts of federal records, shows that little has changed since the administration announced the change in policy. In the current fiscal year, through June, only 14.7 percent of deportation filings have been related to criminal activity. Most of the rest have been for garden variety immigration offenses. TRAC points out that this is slightly worse than in the last year of the Bush administration, when 16 percent of deportation filings were criminal-related. And it's far different from what was going on in 1992, when nearly 30 percent of deportationfilings involved allegations of criminal activity. Of course, back then, the US was deporting far fewer people, just shy of 90,000 compared with more than 212,000 in 2012. Even so, the alleged criminals make up a pretty small percentage of the deportation docket.
The numbers vary radically by state, too. Out of the 700 deportation filings from Tennessee, only 11 were for alleged criminals. But in Hawaii, where 108 people were hit with deportation filings this year, 51 were alleged criminals, nearly 50 percent and the best record in the country for focusing primarily on criminal aliens.
TRAC's numbers, taken from official federal data, have consistently undermined the president's assertions that he's trying to ease up on Latino communities by focusing only on criminals and not all the other immigrants in this country. The administration has insisted that past TRAC reports on this issue are wrong because they don't have all the information on the criminal cases at the root of some of the deportations. TRAC, though, has asked the administration for more data, and the administration hasn't been forthcoming.
|
|
|
|
