Team Obama and the Immigration Courts are slacking Off on Deportations

New deportation cases brought by the Obama administration in the nation's immigration courts have been declining steadily since 2009 and judges have increasingly ruled against deportations, leading to a 43 percent drop in the number of deportations through the courts in the last five years, according to Justice Department statistics released Wednesday.

The figures show that the administration opened 26 percent fewer deportation cases in the courts last year than in 2009. In 2013, immigration judges ordered deportations in 105,064 cases nationwide. 

The statistics present a different picture of President Barack Obama's enforcement policies than the one painted by many immigrant advocates, who have assailed the president as the "deporter in chief" and accused him of rushing to reach a record of 2 million deportations. While Obama has deported more foreigners than any other president, the pace of deportations has recently declined.

The steepest drop in deportations filed in the courts came after 2011, when the administration began to apply more aggressively a policy of prosecutorial discretion that officials said would lead to fewer deportations of immigrants in the country illegally who had no criminal record. In 2013, the Department of Homeland Security opened 187,678 deportation cases, nearly 50,000 fewer than in 2011.

At the same time, the share of cases in which judges decided against deportation and for allowing foreigners to remain in the United States has consistently increased, to about one-third last year from about one-fifth in 2009. 

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The number of deportations ordered by immigration courts is only a portion of total deportations in a given year. But the lower numbers from the courts contributed to a drop in overall deportations last year, when enforcement agents made 368,644 removals, a 10 percent decrease from 2012. Also, some deportations that judges order — for example, if the foreigner becomes a fugitive — may not be carried out...

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