Ninety-five percent of all immigrants who were deported under President Barack Obama were criminals or repeat immigration violators, a new report has found, lending credence to arguments that the president's deportation policies have been lax in that they only focus on the most serious offenders.
According to The Washington Times, the report by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) shows that of the 1.6 million illegal immigrants removed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, just 77,000 had clean records.
"In effect, the Obama administration has shifted from a more generalized model of enforcement to a model focused almost exclusively on illegal border-crossers, obstructionists and criminals," the MPI said, according to the Times.
By contrast, illegal immigrants living beyond the borders in the United States have been largely out of danger of deportation under the Obama administration.
Another report released this week showed that deportations from the interior of the U.S. declined 34 percent in the last year.
According to analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies, nearly 167,000 convicted criminal immigrants with final orders of removal are still at large in the United States.
"Prosecutorial discretion as practiced by the Obama administration has transformed immigration enforcement into a massive catch-and-release program that makes a joke of the law, fails to deter illegal settlement, and allows even illegal aliens who commit crimes to remain here," Jessica Vaughan, the group's director of policy studies,
told Breitbart.
"These policies inflict real harm on Americans and legal immigrants," she added, "in the form of lost jobs, depressed wages, additional social services, and even lost lives. In addition, with the rise of ISIS and other terrorist groups around the world, our lax policies represent an unnecessary national security risk."
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