Why Obama’s Immigration Enforcement Policy Was Better Than Trump’s 

The quality of federal immigration enforcement policy should not be judged by quantity. You would only conclude more deportations equals more success if you believed immigration was bad, which it is not.  

However, President Donald Trump does believe immigration is bad and judges immigration enforcement success by numbers. So, I assume he is mortified that he has deported fewer people than any president in at least 35 years. 

Bill Clinton deported 12.3 million, George W. Bush 10.3 million, and Barack Obama 5.3 million in their eight-year administrations. Joe Biden racked up 4 million. Trump’s first term? 1.9 million, and another 207,000 so far this year. 

Of course, these immigration deportation numbers don’t tell the whole story of each president’s record. But they indicate that Trump’s indiscriminate cruelty and disinterest in human rights is not the best way to deport the masses that his MAGA base wants, nor what most everyone else wants—an immigration policy prioritizing the removal of criminals, not immigrants who came to work and have only committed a misdemeanor by being undocumented. 

The drop in deportations from Clinton and Bush to Obama obscures the strides made by Obama to reorient immigration enforcement towards the removal of criminals.  

The 44th president made two big strategic decisions that strengthened enforcement policy. As the Migration Policy Institute explained, one was to move away from “voluntary” returns of unauthorized border crosses, in which border agents quickly and informally send migrants back “without any meaningful legal consequences.” Under Obama, “formal removal proceedings became far more common as did criminal charges for illegal entry or re-entry.” This greatly reduced the number of deportations overall, but “recidivism along the border fell from 29 percent in FY 2007 to 14 percent in FY 2014.” 

The other shifted from targeting workplaces to focusing on national security threats, border security, and public safety. In 2014, Obama issued an executive order that defined terrorists, criminal gang members, and convicted felons as the highest priority for deportation. In 2009, at the start of Obama’s presidency, 69 percent of deportees fell in this category. By 2016, it was 94 percent.  

The result was fewer deportations than his recent predecessors but a higher number of formally processed “removals” (3.1 million, up from 2 million by Bush) with a much higher concentration of serious criminals removed.  

Trump jettisoned this effective approach, rescinding Obama’s executive order and replacing it with one prioritizing the removal of criminals regardless of severity. In theory, casting a wider net should increase the total number of deportations, but in his first term, Trump was behind Obama’s pace, failing on his own metric of success. Trump’s first-term policies, such as family separation, were sensationalistic, misdirected, cruel—and ineffective at racking up big numbers.  

Furthermore, they were ineffective at protecting Americans from actual criminals. The Cato Institute’s David J. Bier did a deep data dive and concluded that Trump, in his first term, prioritized preventing border crossers from receiving asylum over capturing serious criminals. The family separation policy was the most glaring example, which didn’t last long because of the intense backlash. “The share of prosecuted individuals with prior convictions fell 63 percent from March 2018 to May 2018,” found Bier, “as family separations increased.”  

Shockingly, Trump had a relatively high rate of releasing undocumented immigrant criminals, particularly in 2018 and 2019. Bier wrote: 

 A big pre-pandemic reason for the releases under the Trump administration was that it was determined to detain as many asylum seekers as possible, prioritizing their detention and removal over that of convicted criminals. For instance, in 2019, ICE was using 68 percent of its detention space for individuals without any criminal convictions … In 2019, Trump’s ICE released more than twice the number of individuals convicted of crimes compared to any year during Biden’s presidency. 

Trump’s focus on deporting criminals appears to be withering in his second term as he pressures immigration officials for big numbers. In an article about a Wisconsin Trump voter whose wife was detained by ICE at San Juan, Puerto Rico’s airport as they were returning from their honeymoon, USA Today, noted, “The reality of immigration enforcement is that targeting convicted criminals requires time and manpower; it can take half a dozen agents to arrest a single person. An airport checkpoint … can quickly round up multiple people whose immigration status may be in limbo.” 

The reason why protests flared up in California is that Trump is ramping up workplace raids. Immigration restrictionist Mark Kirkorian explained to The New York Times, “Goosing the numbers is a big part of this because it’s so much more efficient in manpower to raid a warehouse and arrest 100 illegal aliens than it is to send five guys after one criminal.” But going after people who are working not only fails to make us safer, but it also undermines the economy.  

As a result of Trump’s blunderbuss approach, a far higher percentage of those detained by ICE are not criminals. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump reviewed the data this week and found that “on average, 7 percent of ICE arrests between early 2019 and the beginning of this year were non-criminals. The most recent data puts that figure at 23 percent.” 

Trump is tearing the country apart by targeting the undocumented at workplaces, airports, and college campuses. If he wanted to focus on criminals, he had a model that worked. But he junked it so he could abduct people randomly, viciously, and, in some cases, without any due process. And, of course, he chucked it because it was Obama’s immigration enforcement policy. Nothing about Trump’s immigration enforcement policy is making us safer.  

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