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The Bush administration also more than doubled the number of illegal re-entry prosecutions to more than 20,000 per year, while illegal entry charges grew by a factor of 10 to about 50,000 cases per year, according to federal data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
After he took office in 2009, Obama then stepped up deportations to prove he was serious about illegal immigration while bargaining with Republicans over comprehensive immigration reform legislation. After the deal fell apart in Congress in 2013 and a wave of Central American asylum-seekers began arriving in the Rio Grande Valley in 2014, his administration pulled back on en masse prosecutions and instead focused on unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal histories.
After peaking in 2013, however, the number of prosecutions remained above 65,000, higher than it had been under any of his predecessors.
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