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When the administration was called out by immigration activists for deporting 2 million people and dividing hundreds of thousands of families, Obama and his surrogates hid behind the claim that the majority of those removed were criminals. White House strategists must have figured out early on that most Americans — even many Hispanics who support immigration reform — would have less sympathy for hoodlums than housekeepers.
The strategy became to have administration officials such as Janet Napolitano, the former Homeland Security Secretary, and Cecilia Munoz, director of the Domestic Policy Council, publicize the claim that — for instance, in 2011 — as many as 55 percent of those deported that year had, besides entering the country illegally, also committed crimes once they got here.
The spinners would have gotten away with it if researchers with the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, hadn’t crunched the numbers and found that, in 2011, only about 14.9 percent of the people deported were actually charged with a criminal offense. The other 85.1 percent were folks who were trying to earn a living, working as nannies or gardeners. The typical Obama deportee wasn’t a murderer or rapist but a lady selling tamales outside a supermarket without a permit, a battered wife picked up after calling the police on her husband, or the father of a child with terminal cancer.
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