Mexicans Still Make Up Two-Thirds Of Deportees In US, But Numbers Falling

A new analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records shows that although Mexicans are still by far the most common nationality among deportees -- making up about two-thirds of them -- their numbers fell from fiscal year 2012 to 2013. So did the overall number of people deported by the United States -- which deported 10 percent fewer people last year -- but for Mexicans, that decline in numbers was even sharper, at 15 percent less than the previous year, according to the analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a Syracuse University project which collects and publishes ICE data on immigration.

Of the 409,849 people deported by the Obama administration in 2012, 284,924 -- or almost 70 percent -- were Mexicans. By contrast, in 2012, 241,493 Mexicans were deported. That’s 65.5 percent of the 368,644 total number of deportees. Meanwhile, Central Americans continued to make up a larger proportion of those deported: The number of Hondurans and El Salvadorans declined just barely, while Guatemalans -- number two on the list of groups -- were one of the few nationalities which saw more of its citizens deported from the United States from 2012 to 2013. In fiscal year 2012, 43,627 were deported; the following fiscal year, 47,769, almost a 10 percent increase.

The news comes as the Obama administration contemplates changes to its immigration-enforcement policies, including a possible extension of relief from deportation to a greater swath of the estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. The New York Times reported last Sunday that based on an analysis of some 3.2 million deportation cases from the past ten years, two-thirds of deportees either had no record of serious crimes -- including drug trafficking, property theft or violent offenses -- or no record at all.