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Ordinary immigrants without serious criminal records are increasingly being criminalized, prosecuted, and deported. According to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, 55.6 percent of all federal convictions in FY 2014 through March were immigration related. According to the Pew Research Center, unlawful re-entry convictions have seen a 13-fold increase since 1992.
The most serious conviction for many deported immigrants is an immigration or traffic violation. Forty-seven percent of those deported in FY 2012 for committing a crime were convicted of only immigration or traffic offenses.
The rise in deportations of those who have been convicted of immigration or traffic violations has its roots at the start of the Obama administration. Deportations involving cases where the most serious offense was a traffic violation have more than quadrupled, from 43,000 during the past five years of the Bush administration to 193,000 during the first five years of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, removals related to convictions for entering or re-entering the country illegally tripled to more than 188,000 under President Obama.
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