Under the Biden-Harris Administration’s watch, apprehensions, deportations, and expulsions are taking place daily, despite a promise to stop deportations. This administration must prioritize the safety and healing of immigrant communities–and that means stopping deportations and expulsions. It also means guaranteeing the right to seek asylum to individuals who arrive at the southern U.S. border.
Last Updated: June 26, 2023
ICE as an agency has broad authority to decide whether to deport someone or not. Although DHS and ICE create policies on enforcement prioritization (what groups of people it will and will not move to detain and deport), it retains prosecutorial discretion (the authority of an agency or officer to decide what charges to bring and how to pursue each case1), and because of this authority, it can choose whether or not to deport people on a case-by-case basis.
So even though President Biden’s moratorium on deportation has been halted by a Texas court, his agency, ICE, can still decide not to deport people.
This is why we must demand President Biden end all deportations, text “Undeniable” to 877-877 or sign our petition.
1 The Supreme Court has made it clear that “an agency’s decision not to prosecute or enforce, whether through civil or criminal process, is a decision generally committed to an agency’s absolute discretion.” Heckler v. Chaney 470 U.S. 821, 831 (1985).” https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/understanding-prosecutorial-discretion-immigration-law
The number of deportations, expulsions, and apprehensions is a best estimate based on news reports, shared information among trusted immigration-rights organizations, and an average of Title 42 expulsions and Title 8 inadmissible and apprehensions at the border from CBP’s own reporting from January 20th, 2021 to March 2022.
We chose to count Title 42 expulsions because this is an unfair policy Trump-era that uses COVID-19 as an excuse to keep people out of the country and can be reversed immediately, though Biden has chosen not to. We will continue to add them as they are reported each month.
Although, Title 8 and Title 42 are both Trump era policies that unjustly place barriers to migrants trying to access the asylum system at our southern border, CBP is not clear whether their reported Title 8 Apprehension numbers reflect deportations and expulsions. What Title 8 does however, is account for children, family units, single adults, and unaccompanied minors that have been apprehended attempting to cross outside of a port-of-entry, some are declared inadmissible and turned away/expelled, but for the ones apprehended it is not clear whether they are being released to the interior after being detained by CBP/ICE and deported.
As we know, lack of transparency is a major problem for these agencies, ICE only puts out deportation numbers annually, but we knew and wanted to show the magnitude of the problem so we gave you a best approximation which we believe could be lower than the real number.
3 https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics
