Challenge Trump’s Math
Mexico needs to challenge Trump’s baseless claim that his government will immediately deport 2-3 million undocumented criminal immigrants from the United States.
The truth is, nobody knows where Trump got that number.
In a 2013 Homeland Security report the government estimated that there were 1.9 million removable “criminal aliens” living in the United States, but other reports offer different numbers. The Migration Policy Institute estimated in 2015 there were only 820,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions in the U.S.
A 2016 Congressional Research Service report acknowledges that “inconsistencies in data quality, collection and definitions prevent a precise enumeration of the total criminal aliens and key subgroups such as criminal aliens convicted of removals offenses and aggravated felonies.”
In short, Trump appears to be playing it fast and loose with statistics, as he’s done before.
“We don’t know where [Trump’s] two to three million number came from,” Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the U.S. and Naturalization Service (INS) and Migration Policy Institute Senior Fellow, told.
In any event, she says, “It will be very difficult to increase deportations from what the Obama administration was doing a couple of years ago.” Even if Trump discovers millions of undocumented immigrants with criminal records, U.S. enforcement agencies simply don’t have the resources or the detention capacity to carry out such massive roundup and removal effort, Meissner says.
“You can’t just say from one day to the next go up to two million,” she said. “The infrastructure is not there to do that.”
