The Results Are In: Obama Never Intended to Enforce Immigration Laws

Using preliminary numbers, the Associated Press reports that deportations are down to the lowest level in nearly a decade. {snip}

Though the partial FY 2015 number reported by the AP is new, this has been building for a couple of years; deportations have fallen 42 percent since 2012. My colleague Jessica Vaughan reported on this last year.

The operational reason for the collapse in deportations is the Obama administration’s enforcement-suppression policies, which it has labeled “prosecutorial discretion.” The White House has claimed that, given limited resources, it’s focusing only on the worst of the worst among criminal aliens. But then why have even criminal deportations been declining? They can’t blame this on sanctuary cities, because as bad as they are, the number of criminals they’re shielding from deportation isn’t big enough to account for such a steep decline in numbers.

The AP reporter was engaging in gratuitous spin on behalf of the administration when she wrote, in her own voice, that: “The decline suggests the administration has been failing to find criminal immigrants in the U.S. interior, or that fewer immigrants living in the U.S. illegally had criminal records serious enough to justify deporting them.” As they say on Twitter, HAHAHAHAHAHA! The administration hasn’t been “failing to find criminal immigrants,” nor have non-citizens suddenly become more law-abiding. Instead, the White House has essentially prohibited immigration agents from doing their jobs, which is a big part of why DHS employee morale is so low.

The administration’s own spin is that more of the illegals arrested at the border are non-Mexican, and it takes longer to deport them. Except that it’s letting them all go and deporting almost none of them.

In short, the drop in deportations is a policy choice made by the White House, not some development out of its control.

{snip}

These latest deportation numbers vindicate House Republicans’ refusal to vote on Rubio’s amnesty bill. It’s now indisputable that this administration had no intention of enforcing immigration law tomorrow if it was given an amnesty today. Obama’s promises of future enforcement, never very credible, are now exposed as lies. Why did Rubio and the other 13 Republicans who voted for the Gang of Eight bill believe him?