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Why Data on New Deportation Cases is More Revealing Than Actual Deportations
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For journalists covering immigration enforcement, deportation statistics get all the attention. It’s understandable. Unlike most deportation data which is messy and jargon-ridden, deportation numbers feel concrete, even non-technical. One deportation means one person ejected from the United States. Simple, right?
But there’s a problem.
Using deportation statistics to characterize immigration enforcement now is misleading. Deportation cases (technically “removal” cases) take months and years to complete. In 2016, I witnessed the final hearing in a removal case that started in 1980. This means that a person deported in, say, August 2020, was almost certainly not put into removal proceedings in August 2020, or August 2019, or August 2018, or… you get the idea. A deportation data point in August 2020 doesn’t really represent what the world is like in August 2020. It represents a point in the past.
What’s the solution?
If you really want to understand immigration enforcement today, I argue that you couldn’t do much better than looking at new removal cases.
