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Barack Obama

Voices: Obama deporter in chief? Not quite

Alan Gomez
USA TODAY
Cynthia Diaz, 18, stands outside the White House on April 8, 2014. She was there with a group of immigrant activists to protest deportations. Cynthia's mother was deported in 2011 and crossed back into the U.S. from Mexico in March. She is now being detained in Arizona.

MIAMI - Much has been made in recent weeks over President Obama's deportation record.

Critics say he's ignored his responsibility to enforce the nation's laws and allowed undocumented immigrants to roam free. Immigration advocates say he's escalated enforcement to a record-setting pace, tearing apart good, hard-working families in the process.

So which is it? A slew of news articles and think tank reports have used reams of deportation data to come up with wildly varying conclusions. But the fact is this: The number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. deported by the Obama administration has fallen in each year he's been in office.

Deporter in chief? Far from it.

U.S. Border Patrol agents detain undocumented immigrants near the U.S.-Mexico border on April 11, 2013, near Mission, Texas.

In Obama's first year in office, his administration deported 237,941 people. That number represents the traditional definition of a deportation: someone living their life in the U.S. when they encounter a law enforcement officer who has them shipped out of the country.

By last year, that number had fallen to 133,551. And of those, 71,938 had been previously convicted of at least one felony or several misdemeanors – the "criminal aliens" that the administration has targeted. That means of the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the country, fewer than 70,000 who have led generally peaceful lives here were deported last year.

Yes, the Obama administration says it deports 400,000 people annually, recently passing the 2 million mark throughout the president's time in office. But the majority of those cases involve people caught by Border Patrol agents along the Southwest border and processed through Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In years past, those people would have been quickly shipped back to Mexico. But starting under President George W. Bush, many of those people are being handed over to ICE so that the agency can formally charge them.

The basic accounting of Obama's deportation record has been muddled in two ways.

First, the president, in an effort to appease Republican critics, has touted the 400,000-deportations-a-year number as proof of his tough record.

Secondly, the president has come under increasing fire from immigration advocacy groups to either slow down deportations or stop them completely.

The backlash started last September, when seven undocumented immigrants handcuffed themselves to the gates of the White House to call on the president to halt deportations. More groups joined in the chorus, culminating in a March speech by Janet Murguía, the president of the National Council of La Raza, the country's largest and most well-financed immigration advocacy group. In it, she called Obama "deporter in chief."

Agents for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detain a group of people who came ashore on a boat on April 4, 2014, in Palos Verdes Estates near Los Angeles.

That led to a White House meeting last month, when the president voiced his frustration with leaders of several immigration advocacy groups. In his time in office, Obama has stopped the work site immigration raids so frequent under Bush and created a program that has granted protected status to more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children. He has stopped the deportation of relatives of military members, is considering extending work visas to spouses of foreigners working in the country and ordered a system-wide review of deportation practices to see how to conduct them "more humanely."

During the meeting, Obama asked the immigration advocates why they shifted their focus from House Republicans, who hold the keys to immigration overhaul. The Senate passed a sweeping immigration bill in June, but House Republicans have done nothing in the 10 months since.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., summed up the feelings of the White House, when she called the focus on Obama a "gift to the Republicans."

Judging by the numbers, she's right.

Gomez is a Miami-based correspondent for USA TODAY.

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