Why Trump won't be deporting "millions" of criminals

• About 13,100 of those were convicted in homicides and are imprisoned in the U.S. They'll have deportation hearings after serving their sentences.

To deport millions of "criminals," Trump would have to consider all undocumented immigrants as criminals. But being in the U.S. illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal one.

• Those millions would have to include agricultural, construction and service workers, students and others who are unauthorized to be in the U.S. but have no criminal backgrounds, according to legal specialists and an Axios review of federal immigration data.
• Unauthorized immigrants caught near the border can be quickly removed.
• But any convicted immigrants serving time — or those charged with crimes — will face deportation hearings only after the U.S. criminal justice system is done with them.

Catch up quick: In his inauguration speech, Trump previewed the executive orders on immigration restrictions he later signed, repeating his false claim that the nation is plagued by millions of undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

• "All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came," he said.
• His surrogates have repeated that claim, adding that Trump's mass deportation plan would begin by prioritizing dangerous criminals — something the federal government has been doing since the Clinton administration.

Reality check: Less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the past fiscal year — involving about 8,400 people — included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found.

• Immigrants arrested in homicides accounted for less than 1% of "at-large" arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the last six years, an Axios review found.
• At-large arrests are those made in public settings, as opposed to when ICE agents pick up someone who's already behind bars.

Zoom in: An Axios review of data for nearly 180,000 ICE at-large arrests from October 1, 2017, through Sept. 30, 2023, found that the most common charges for undocumented immigrants were driving under the influence (15%) and those involving drugs (15%), assaults (9%) and other traffic offenses (9%).

• 3% of the arrests involved larceny, 1.7% involved sexual assaults and 0.7% were linked to homicides.

What they're saying: "There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport," Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.

• Trump "keeps trying to bullsh-t with the public that there are all these particularly serious so-called criminals. There aren't enough of those people to exist to be 1 million," Karen Tumlin, director of the immigrant legal advocacy group Justice Action Center, tells Axios.
• Both Hallett and Tumlin expect Trump to begin calling all undocumented immigrants "criminals" in order to say millions of criminals could be deported.

Between the lines: Trump's push to immediately deport those with actual criminal records also could run into hurdles put up by state and local prosecutors, legal specialists say.

• Crime victims will want justice, and prosecutors are unlikely to allow an immigrant convicted of a serious felony to escape prison in exchange for immediate deportation to freedom in another country, Tumlin said.
• Once they serve time, convicted immigrants typically have to wait in ICE detention for a deportation hearing, like everyone else in the U.S. immigration system.
• "There's no skip-the-line for criminal punishment," Tumlin said.
• Very rarely does ICE allow undocumented immigrants with convictions for dangerous felonies to return to the public after serving time. Some convicted of nonviolent crimes are released, however.

Study after study has indicated that immigrants — those in the U.S. legally, and those who aren't — commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.

• "This scary rhetoric that says it's about so-called dangerous people and serious criminals within our midst," Tumlin said. "The numbers, the math ... just doesn't math."