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In October 2011, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano claimed that 55 percent of the people deported in fiscal 2011 were "criminal aliens." Cecilia Munoz, the head of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote an article on the White House Blog in which she claimed that "more than half of all removals are people with criminal records."
So what did the researchers at TRAC find? Poring over the records of thousands of deportation proceedings in immigration courts in all 50 states, they discovered that the actual percentage of deportees who were criminal aliens is much lower than the administration claimed. According to TRAC, only about 14.9 percent of the people deported this year were charged with any criminal offense. This means that 85.1 percent committed no infraction other than being in the country illegally, which is a civil offense. These aren't criminals. These are the housekeepers and landscapers to whom we give our security codes.
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