Amid riots in Los Angeles and other cities nationwide against immigration enforcement, some have revived the old talking point that former President Barack Obama was the “Deporter-in-Chief.” The implication is if mass deportations under Obama didn’t spark outrage, why the fury now? But the claim gives credit to Obama where credit simply is not due. Obama didn’t preside over an unprecedented crackdown on illegal immigration — he redefined deportation statistics to make it look that way.
Back in 2014, the National Council of La Raza labeled Obama “deporter-in-chief.” The label has stuck around for years, with ABC News declaring in 2016 that “Obama Has Deported More People Than Any Other President” and NPR stating “Obama Leaves Office As ‘Deporter-In-Chief'” in 2017.
Even conservatives have peddled the label in a bid to undermine the left’s opposition to Trump’s deportation plan.
“Throwback to 2014: Obama was crowned ‘Deporter-in-Chief’ for kicking out record numbers of illegal immigrants. No riots. No street chaos. No cries of ‘authoritarianism.’ Just crickets and quiet headlines. But now that Trump is enforcing the law? Suddenly the left is staging ‘spontaneous’ protests nationwide,” Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt said in a post on X.
But the label was untrue.
What really happened is the Obama-Biden administration changed the definition of what counted as a deportation, as reported by The L.A. Times in 2014.
“The portrait of a steadily increasing number of deportations rests on statistics that conceal almost as much as they disclose. A closer examination shows the immigrants living illegally in most of the continental U.S. are less likely to be deported today than before Obama came to office, according to immigration data,” the article explains. “Expulsions of people who are settled and working in the United States have fallen steadily since his first year in office, and are down more than 40% since 2009.”
According to The L.A. Times, “the number of people deported at or near the border has gone up — primarily as a result of changing who gets counted in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s deportation statistics.”
“The vast majority of those border crossers would not have been treated as formal deportations under most previous administrations. If all removals were tallied, the total sent back to Mexico each year would have been far higher under those previous administrations than it is now,” the article continued.
In reality, his administration cooked the books. Obama didn’t reclaim American sovereignty — he helped facilitate its erosion with clever statistics and a largely complicit media. Conservatives who echo the “Deporter-in-Chief” narrative aren’t just mistaken; they’re giving Obama the credibility he neither earned nor deserves in an attempt to justify the credibility of President Donald Trump’s deportation plans.
There’s no need to reach for false comparisons to justify what Trump is doing. Trump doesn’t need a precedent to enforce the law. He doesn’t need any excuse to deport illegal aliens and restore national sovereignty. The fact that it hasn’t been done before (despite the insistence that Obama was the “deporter-in-chief”) is exactly why it must be done now.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2