Internal documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that the Obama administration has been “cooking the books” in order to reach their “record” number of deported illegal immigrants, chairman Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday.
Based on the internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents, the number of removals are actually down, the opposite of what the administration has been claiming.
According to the committee’s review, in 2011 officials at the Department of Homeland Security began including the number of individuals removed through the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) in its annual removal numbers. ATEP is a program which moves apprehended illegal immigrants to another point along the border.
With the ATEP subtraction, in 2011 the estimated 397,000 deportations become approximately 360,000, and the 2012 removals to date drop from about 334,000 to an estimated 263,000, according to the committee estimates. Projections for number of people to be deported by end of the year drops from 400,000 to 315,000 removals.
The new estimates mean that this year the Obama administration’s deportation record is 14 percent below 2008 (which was 369,000) and 19 percent below 2009 (which was 389,000).
