Donald Trump wants to immediately deport 2 million to 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. One problem: There almost certainly aren’t that many people who fit those criteria.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, Trump said he would prioritize deporting or incarcerating the immigrants who are both in the country illegally and who are “gang members, drug dealers” or have other criminal convictions. He said there are “a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million.”
It isn’t clear where Trump came up with those numbers. But according to the Department of Homeland Security, there are roughly 1.9 million non-citizen immigrants who have been convicted of crimes and are subject to deportation — what the government calls “removable criminal aliens.”
The DHS report is from fiscal 2013. It doesn’t specify the date of its estimate. That total, however, includes both undocumented immigrants and noncitizens in the country legally.
Noncitizen immigrants who are in the country legally can be deported if they are convicted of certain crimes. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank, estimates that there are roughly 11 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally and that approximately 820,000 of them have criminal records. (The Migration Policy Institute doesn’t take positions on specific legislation but is generally seen as favoring immigration. The Pew Research Center, another think tank, comes up with a similar figure for the total number of undocumented immigrants.) Some of those immigrants are already incarcerated: A recent report from the Congressional Research Service estimated that at the end of 2013, there were more than 140,000 non-citizen immigrants in local, state and federal prisons and jails. (That figure includes people who are in the country legally, not all of whom are subject to deportation.)
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