“It’s a way to reduce your immigration enforcement without going through the legislative process of changing the law,” said Claude Arnold, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in charge of Southern California, referring to those policies. “It’s a way of doing a pseudo-amnesty without legislatively doing an amnesty.”

Arnold stressed that deportation numbers are down in two key categories: criminals and interior enforcement.

On the first, Obama has emphasized throughout his two terms that he is focused on deporting “criminal aliens.” Yet the new numbers show criminal alien deportations declined 27 percent from last year, from 86,923 to 63,127 in 2015.

Interior enforcement refers to immigrants arrested away from the border or a port of entry. But of the 69,478 deported under that category, 91 percent were previously convicted of a crime. That means just 5,939 illegal immigrants – who had not otherwise committed a crime — were deported from U.S. cities and towns in all of 2015.