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As proof that it is weeding out the “bad guys,” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) recently reported that 59 percent of deportations in fiscal year 2013 involved noncitizens with criminal records. Yet, what ICE did not highlight is that the vast majority of criminal deportees were expelled for non-violent offenses, with 60 percent convicted of misdemeanors punishable by less than one year in prison. In 2012, less than one percent of such deportations involved homicide convictions. And according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, in the decade since 9/11, the government has deported thirty-seven people on terrorism grounds—a figure surprisingly low given the law’s expansive definition of terrorism. Clearly, immigrants are not the serious threat the government paints them to be.
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