Donald Trump moves on promise to deport immigrants with criminal records

In his campaign for the White House and throughout his presidency, Donald Trump spotlighted cases of Americans killed by immigrants in the country illegally and pledged to deport "all criminal aliens" to make America safer.

Days after the November 2016 election, Trump told CBS' Lesley Stahl that immigrants here illegally with criminal records, gang members and drug dealers would be incarcerated or deported. "We have a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million," Trump said.

Trump was referring to a Department of Homeland Security report for fiscal years 2011-13 that estimated there were 1.9 million "removable criminal aliens" in the United States at the time. The 1.9 million included immigrants legally and illegally in the country.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, estimated in July 2015 that 820,000 of the 1.9 million noncitizens convicted of crimes were in the country illegally. But the exact number is difficult to determine. Studies also have found that immigrants here illegally are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States.

A fiscal year 2019 performance report from the Department of Homeland Security details how many immigrants in the country illegally with criminal convictions were returned or removed from the United States by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It amounted to about 423,000 people from fiscal years 2017 to 2019 (2017 included about four months of the Obama administration), according to the report.

Removals reported by ICE include people apprehended by Border Patrol and sent to ICE for deportation, and people who already live in the United States and were arrested by ICE agents.

From fiscal years 2017 to 2019, ICE agents arrested and eventually deported around 205,000 convicted criminals and about 36,000 immigrants with pending criminal charges.

Over that same period, ICE said it deported around 17,000 known or suspected gang members and 145 known or suspected terrorists. ICE did not specify how many were known gang members or terrorists.

Overall, ICE missed the target number of criminals it planned to remove in 2017, surpassed its target in 2018 and was just short of it in 2019. DHS said ICE missed its target in 2019 because of the reallocation of personnel to the border to assist with a surge of arrivals and due to non-cooperation from local law enforcement agencie

Trump's administration has deported thousands of immigrants with criminal records and people known or suspected to be gang members and terrorists. He promised to deport "all" immigrants here illegally who are criminals, and while a precise number is hard to pin down, the numbers he has deported fall short of his own estimates. We rate this a Compromise.