Fact Check: Reuters Is Wrong — Biden Is Not Deporting More Illegal Aliens than Trump

Anew article from Reuters is pushing a curious headline: “Biden is now deporting more people than Trump”. Americans paying attention to the Biden administration’s destruction of immigration enforcement and the resulting mass illegal immigration likely assume they’ve misread the headline, and upon a second reading likely assume Reuters printed a typo. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that Reuters is simply misleading its readers. In fact, deportations have plummeted under the Biden administration and criminal illegal aliens are some of the top beneficiaries of this administration’s lawlessness.

The Reuters article seems to be an attempt to help President Biden, whose polling on immigration is abysmal. It opens by stating that Biden “has struggled with record numbers of migrants caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally”, inferring that the unprecedented run on our border is outside his control and ignoring the fact that it’s the direct result of the Biden administration’s own anti-enforcement policies.

To understand how Reuters makes the claim on Biden’s deportations, it’s necessary to understand the difference between a “removal” conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and a “return” conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Generally, when we talk about deportations, we’re talking about a removal — an arrest of an illegal alien processed by ICE and deported back to the alien’s home country. When we talk about returns, we’re generally talking about people apprehended near the border who are quickly pushed back — returned — to Mexico within a matter of hours. And these returns are often of the same people attempting to enter illegally multiple times.

DHS explains that a return is confirmed movement of an “alien out of the United States not based on an order of removal, but through either voluntary departure or voluntary return”. DHS explains that a “voluntary return may only take place at a border, and be facilitated by CBP”. It can get a little more complicated than that, but generally speaking, returns are not removals or deportations.

If this discussion sounds familiar, it’s likely because this very issue was central to a debate over immigration numbers under the Obama administration, which conflated data on returns and removals in an attempt to give the appearance of a strong commitment to immigration enforcement (in order to justify an amnesty bill). Pro-amnesty media outlets helped spread the misinformation. It wasn’t until the amnesty bill was dead that the Los Angeles Times admitted President Obama cooked the books in a piece titled, “High deportation figures are misleading”.

Obama himself eventually admitted that the alleged high deportation numbers “are actually a little deceptive because what we’ve been doing is … we’ve been apprehending folks at the borders and sending them back. That is counted as a deportation, even though they may have only been held for a day or 48 hours, sent back — that’s counted as a deportation”. I still don’t consider DHS immigration data produced under the Obama administration to be all that reliable or accurate on account of these politicized efforts.

This is a well-known issue within recent immigration policy history, so one wonders why Reuters is attempting to spread the same misinformation today. Is this an attempt to help President Biden on an issue where his polling numbers are abysmal? Did someone inside the Biden White House decide to dust off the Obama-era playbook, hoping to help President Biden during an election year? Instead of using misleading analysis to promote an amnesty, are they now using it to promote a presidential candidate?

The Removal Data. Reuters apparently wants readers to think that the Biden administration has a high rate of deportations, but the reality is that the Biden administration has burdened CBP with a high rate of returns precisely because of a dramatic decrease in deportations.

A deportation figure produced by ICE under the Biden administration can be found in the agency’s annual report. The Biden administration’s own data on deportations shows a dramatic decline: