I’m having a ‘discussion’ with someone on another board of a political nature when the subject of deportations came up. I, of course, brought up Trump’s use of masked ICE agents who were known to arrest and deport legal aliens.
Then he posted a link to this website, where it details deportations under the last few presidents. Thinking he made some ground on me regarding Trump not being that bad, he gloated a bit. And not that I follow deportations that closely, but the figures did surprise me.
Of course, there are a lot illegal aliens in this country and I’m not opposed to sending them back. But they do deserve due process and to be treated humanely. And I think this is the difference.
How do you interpret this graph as it pertains to Biden vs Trump? And how do you feel about their respective handling of deportations?
That is exactly the point. It isn’t the deportations - it’s the elimination of constitutional guardrails by an authoritarian seeking to consolidate power and lay the groundwork for applying the degradation of due process on his political enemies.
Some who are being deported are those who were here claiming asylum and until their claim is heard by a court, they have the right to remain. So those people are not here illegally. Others who were being deported in the past few months included students and researchers at universities who spoke out about the situation in Palestine. Again, they had legal status in the country. The administration talks about deporting the “worst of the worst” but that’s only a small number of the undocumented and of those being deported.
You know the old saying that it is better to have 1000 guilty people go free than 1 innocent man sent to prison? One citizen (or otherwise here legally) deported is too many.
Even if the number is lower (pro-rated for the length of term so far, yadda yadda yadda), the problem is snatching random people off the street by unidentifiable masked men, and then whisking them to Louisiana and out of the country before they or their families have any chance to even talk to a judge about jurisdiction, due process, legal representation, etc. They also haven’t been going after the “worst of the worst” because those people are too scary for ICE.
I feel that it shows that Biden was able to deport more illegals than Trump despite rolling back most of the obscenely cruel stuff Trump did in his first term.
Of course, all that was nothing compared to what’s currently happening, which is a dystopian dictator run amuck.
OK, well, something is different about those figures then, because 1 million deportations on the other graph would not be “the most since the Obama years”. The article talks about “ICE deportations” so I assume the graph is looking at total deportations while the article is looking only at deportations done by ICE?