Immigration News Today: Fewer People In US Less Than A Year Being Deported

Immigration Court records indicate changes are emerging in the way deportations are being handled by the Department of Homeland Security, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse said Tuesday.

Cases filed since President Donald Trump’s inauguration through the end of February indicate more cases are being filed against individuals who were detained, California is seeing more cases proportionally compared with Texas and New York, and fewer cases are being filed against individuals who entered the country less than a year ago and against juveniles and women with children.

Trump promised to step of deportations of undocumented immigrants and said he would direct immigration officials to concentrate on those with criminal records and in gangs. He has estimated as many as 3 million people fall into that category.

Read: Trump Deportations Include Immigrants Without Criminal Records

The clearinghouse, a nonpartisan, nonprofit data research center, said since Trump took office, 11,040 cases seeking deportation orders have been filed. These notices to appear, or NTAs, constitute official notice the government is seeking to deport an individual. Many of the cases, however, were initiated during the Obama administration since there is a delay between the time a case is filed and an NTA is issued.

Most of the deportation cases were filed in Texas, California and New York, in that order. However, the number of California cases is increasing while Texas cases are decreasing.

Read: Mass Deportations Have Begun, Congressman Says

From 2012 to 2016, 270,574 cases were filed in Texas, 24.2 percent of the total, while 171,139 were filed in California (15.3 percent) and 94,294 were filed in New York (8.4 percent). For 2017, in comparing the number of cases filed before Trump assumed office and those filed after, Texas’ proportion fell to 21.1 percent and California’s climbed to 17.8 percent.

Though more cases are being filed against people already in the United States rather than those apprehended along the border, the clearinghouse report cautioned that doesn’t “necessarily imply that interior apprehensions have actually risen. It may simply reflect that cases referred by Customs and Border Protection are down so that the proportion of interior cases have risen.”

Court records indicate 41 percent of cases filed since Trump took office involve individuals who entered the country within the last year, down from 62 percent in 2016.

More than 90 percent of the cases filed since Jan. 20 used lack of a current visa or “being present in the country in violation of the law” as their basis rather than Trump’s stated preference for criminals to be the main targets. Only 8 percent of the cases were filed on the basis of criminal conviction or behavior, and no cases cited terrorism. Three cases, however, cited a “national security violation.”

Trump has asked police departments to start detaining undocumented immigrants, a request that has met with opposition in major metropolitan areas where police have said such action is not part of their job description and would make their jobs harder.

Most of the deportation cases have been filed against Mexican immigrants, followed by people from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti. More than half of all undocumented immigrants are from Mexico.