Obama administration deports a record number of immigrants

It is an oddity of the Obama years: A president who wants new pathways to legal residency for millions of undocumented immigrants is deporting them at a record rate.

From Oct. 1, 2010, to the end of last month, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials expelled 396,906 illegal immigrants - the largest number in the agency's history.

Annual deportations have increased 400 percent since 1996, with "more than a million people [expelled] since the beginning of the Obama administration," notes a University of California at Berkeley Law School study released this month.

The report, "Secure Communities by the Numbers," concluded that many immigrants "are pushed rapidly through the system, without appropriate checks or opportunities to challenge their detention and/or deportation."

Of the nearly 400,000 people deported last year, the government said, 55 percent were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors, including 1,119 homicides, 5,848 sexual offenses, 44,653 drug offenses, and 35,927 cases of driving under the influence.

The remaining 45 percent committed civil infractions - overstaying a visa, for example - but had not violated criminal statutes.

ICE's Philadelphia field office - which has jurisdiction in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and West Virginia - deported 6,746 people last year, including 4,159 convicted of felonies or misdemeanors. That put its rate of "criminal alien" expulsions at about 61 percent.

The Philadelphia office could not immediately say how many of its deportees were in each of the categories cited in the national statistics.

Across the country, the year-end totals "indicate that we are making progress, with more convicted criminals, recent border crossers, egregious immigration law violators, and immigration fugitives being removed," ICE director John Morton said.

Defenders of this year's record number say it is high time the federal government cracked down on illegal immigration to protect Americans from potential foreign terrorists and other criminals.

Pro-immigrant activists, including Frank Sharry of the America's Voice Education Fund, say the nation's policy on deportation is not what it purports to be.