The Washington Post published a story today titled "More of the men being deported now have lived in the U.S. for years." It's clear from reading the story that this is intended to alarm readers, but the actual information presented doesn't seem alarming at all.
Keep in mind that Since Trump took office, border crossings are down to around 10,000 people a month. That's not nothing but it's a fraction of what the figures were three years ago when the average was closer to 200,000 per month. Anyway, keep all that in mind as you read this.
The Trump administration’s vast deportation effort has led to the removal of an unusually high number of undocumented men who have lived and worked in the United States for years, according to a Washington Post analysis, upending the livelihoods and routines of scores of families...
The Post’s analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows that almost a quarter of the 300,000 men removed since January 2025 had lived in the United States for at least three years. In the last year of the Biden administration, less than a 10th of all deported men had been in the country for that long before they were removed.
There's a graph that goes along with this which shows the median number of days deportees spent in the U.S. And sure enough, that numbers is up to around 1,000 days this year or roughly 3 years in the country.
Gee, I wonder what could explain this change? As mentioned above, practically no one is coming into the country in the past 15 months. So you're not going to be removing tens of thousands of people who were only in the U.S. for a week or less, the way you might have during the Biden administration. Those people aren't going back because they stopped coming in the first place.
So who can you remove? Well, how about the millions of people that Joe Biden allowed in during his four years in office. Estimates on the total range between 2.5 million and 8 million migrants, but for the sake of argument, let's say it was 5 million. At a minimum, those people have been here for about a year and a half and, if we go back to the start of Biden's term when the numbers shot up, they might have been here for a little over 5 years.
All that to say, deporting people who've been here for a median of 3 years seems about right. Mostly, ICE is removing the people Biden let in when he took a three year vacation from managing the border. The headline for this article really could have been, "ICE deporting migrants who came across the border under Biden." I'm pretty sure that's one of the things Trump was specifically elected to do, which is why that's not the headline.
The story also points out that only about a third of the folks being deported have criminal convictions.
The share of those removed who have criminal convictions also has shifted significantly. Most of those deported in the decade before Trump took office again had been convicted of a crime. Now the reverse is true: Nearly two-thirds of the men removed since the start of the second Trump administration do not have criminal convictions.
Didn't this story just tell us that the median time these people have been in the U.S. is three years? Really it seems pretty striking that a full third of those being removed have convictions. That seems pretty high for a group of people who've only been here around 36 months. But again, the Post wants us to be upset about this so it includes stories about families "torn apart" when a migrant gets deported. I'm not sure this one is helping their case really. [emphasis added]
The 27-year-old had started the WhatsApp group chat after her partner, Maikel Rojas, was detained by ICE in October. He’d gone to a routine check-in at an ICE field office in South Florida and was taken into custody.
Maikel had served 13 years in prison after being convicted of felony accessory to murder. His green card was revoked, and he was given a final deportation order. DHS said in a statement that the agency was later “forced to release him” because Cuba would not take him back.
Since then, Roxana said, he’d been diligent about attending ICE check-ins to renew his license and obtain a work permit. They’d met and were raising her son together. He helped support her, as well as her aging parents. But his troubles with the law, including a 2025 stalking charge, made him a priority for ICE removal. He was taken into custody and sent to the state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Roxana felt driven to protest. She went to the detention center and joined people demonstrating outside. It was there that she realized how many other women also were trying to free their husbands, sons and brothers. She created the WhatsApp group for them to converse and called it CHINGA LA MIGRA — invoking a slang in Spanish that means “F--- ICE.”
He was a good man except for the murder and stalking. What an outrage that he could be deported. No, not really. I'm fine with it. Except he hasn't been deported. He's been released again because Cuba still won't take him back. They're smarter than we are apparently.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump, illegal immigration into our great country has virtually stopped. Despite the radical left's lies, new legislation wasn't needed to secure our border, just a new president.
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