LA Times admits Obama is not the "Deporter in Chief" ("High deportation figures are misleading")

The Los Angeles Times is perhaps even more in favor of illegal immigration and amnesty than their big brother. But, a select few lies are even too much for the L.A. Times.

One case in point is the claim from the National Council of La Raza and others that Barack Obama is the "Deporter in Chief" and that he's deported more illegal aliens than George W Bush.

Now, over to Brian Bennett of the L.A. Times, who offers "High deportation figures are misleading/Immigrants living illegally beyond the border area are less likely to be deported under 'deporter in chief' President Obama, contrary to widespread belief" (link, bolding added):

...the portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose. A closer examination shows that immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data.

Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.

On the other side of the ledger, the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up - primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's deportation statistics.

The vast majority of those border crossers would not have been treated as formal deportations under most previous administrations. If all removals were tallied, the total sent back to Mexico each year would have been far higher under those previous administrations than it is now...

...At the same time, the administration largely ended immigration roundups at workplaces and shifted investigators into targeting business owners who illegally hired foreign workers.

"If you are a run-of-the-mill immigrant here illegally, your odds of getting deported are close to zero - it's just highly unlikely to happen," John Sandweg, until recently the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview.

Even when immigration officials want to deport someone who already has settled in the country, doing so is "virtually impossible" because of a lengthy backlog in the immigration courts, Sandweg said. Once people who have no prior removals or convictions are placed in deportation proceedings, actually removing them from the country can take six years or more in some jurisdictions, Sandweg said...