President Donald Trump’s officials have dramatically expanded the deportation of migrants who do not have criminal convictions, according to a critical report by CBS.
The good news is buried in a skewed report from CBS News that suggests Trump should not have deported 153,000 migrants who have not been formally convicted of a crime by a jury or a judge. Those deportation numbers are good for Americans who have lost wealth and wages amid a vast inflow of foreign workers and renters into their communities.
The February 9 report by CBS claims:
Less than 14 percent of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
The report, however, admits that 60 percent of the deported migrants had criminal records:
Nearly 60 percent of ICE arrestees over the past year had criminal charges or convictions, the document indicates. But among that population, the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.
CBS’s focus on the convicted and violent 14 percent instead of the criminal 60 percent spotlights the establishment media’s continued campaign to hide crime by illegal migrants. This campaign relies heavily on reporters who are more sympathetic to migrants than to Americans. In this case, the CBS reporter, Camilo Montoya-Galvez, is a legalized migrant from Colombia.
But many violent crimes go undetected or unsolved, so wrecking CBS’s claim that only 14 percent of deported migrants have violent histories.
The Department of Homeland Security scoffed at CBS’s claim that only 14 percent of the arrested migrants were violent:
The White House’s “Rapid Response 47” account noted:
The Fake News seems to think that illegal alien drug traffickers, drunk drivers, burglars, and those with weapons charges — whom they classify as “nonviolent” offenders — should be left alone, allowed to roam freely within the United States. Not under this administration.
CBS assumes that migrants without convictions are not criminals, even though nearly all illegals commit crimes such as identity theft, illegal entry, and illegal re-entry. For example, in a February 4 article that sympathized with an illegal-migrant couple, the New York Times admitted:
For years, the couple said, Enrique had been using another person’s identity — a common but illegal way for undocumented immigrants to get the paperwork they need to work in the country. They said that not long after arriving in the United States, a friend had helped Enrique use the identity of a Honduran who had work authorization. Last year, the Trump administration moved to end that type of work authorization, making it harder for Enrique to keep using that identity.
The couple flew a Mexican flag outside their rented house, and were able to get U.S. citizenship — plus the economic benefits — for their three Mexican children. “We don’t consider ourselves criminals… We consider ourselves working people,” said the mother.
But the couple did damage to Americans by shifting the national labor market in favor of employers, and by nudging up the price of housing for young Americans. The couple’s pocketbook impact, although microscopic, is replicated across the nation by at least 20 million other illegals, so helping to explain the massive economic damage suffered by hundreds of millions of Americans since the 1990s.
The economic damage includes reduced corporate investment in productivity-boosting technology and a reduced number of births to young American families.
Polling shows that Americans are split over migration enforcement. Clear majorities favor the deportation of both violent and non-violent migrants, but a crucial block of swing voters is unnerved by video coverage of deportations. This PR problem is managed by Trump’s deputies who spotlight the deportation of violent criminals, dubbed “the Worst of the Worst.”
CBS’s report seeks to undermine the PR strategy, saying:
The internal DHS figures undermine frequent assertions by the Trump administration that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting dangerous and violent criminals living in the U.S. illegally, people Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have regularly called the “worst of the worst.”
But under Trump’s low-migration, high-deportation reforms, Americans’ wages are up, housing costs are down, inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive and earn more wages for each working hour. His economic reforms, however, are opposed by establishment Republicans and their progressive partners.
RestaurantBusinessOnline.com reported on January 23 that Trump’s officials are raising voters’ wages by deporting illegal migrants: “Fewer workers mean restaurants will once again have to compete for employees the only way they can, by paying higher wages. Wages over the next two years are expected to accelerate, according to Oxford Economics, from 3.7 percent this year to 5.6 percent by 2027.”
Trump’s deportation efforts are pressuring other illegal migrants to go home, the New York Times story admitted:
“A lot of fellow paisans are wanting to leave,” he said. “It doesn’t look like this thing is going to get resolved. It’s going from bad to worse.”
The article did not discuss the rising number of self-deportations, or the migrants deported by other government agencies, such as the Customs and Border Patrol agency.
Amid the argument over crime, the CBS report does make clear that ICE is deporting many more migrants who do not have criminal convictions — which is a huge break from prior administrations.
The deportations are large enough to begin reducing the migration-inflated illegal “Sanctuary City Economies” in the Democrats’ states.
In 2024, Biden’s deputies deported just 271,484 migrants — but 80 percent of those were arrested and deported as they came over the border. The vast majority of other Biden-deported migrants were violent criminals or people with deportation orders from a judge — because Biden’s officials wanted both legal and illegal migrants to inflate Biden’s economy.
In December 2021, the Center for Immigration Studies noted that very few migrants were being deported from the interior of the country:
For example, the Baltimore Field Office removed a grand total of 32 aliens during Biden’s first five months. This field office covers all of Maryland, including Montgomery and Prince Georges Counties adjacent to Washington, DC, which have significant numbers of illegal alien residents and which are hotbeds of MS-13 and 18th Street gang activity. It also includes the populous Baltimore City and Baltimore and Anne Arundel Counties, which have a significant MS-13 gang presence, not to mention three other counties that have 287(g) partnership programs enabling certain local officers to identify and arrest criminal aliens — and yet they could only manage to remove 32 aliens, or one every three to four days.
Under Biden, deportations by interior ICE offices dropped by 90 percent from 2019 to 2021, the CIS noted. Even the deportation of violent migrants dropped by almost 66 percent, CIS noted.
The massive inflow of migrants was good for Wall Street and government agencies — but it flatlined wages, spiked housing costs, reduced workplace investment, and minimized corporate effort to hire Americans who have fallen out of the workforce.
