Trump campaigned on a vow to round up the “worst of the worst” offenders among the criminals who were living illegally inside the United States. But CBS News has obtained deportation data that indicates the Trump administration’s deportation push has ensnared many undocumented immigrants without violent criminal records.
Of the estimated 100,000 people who were deported between January 1 and June 24 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 70,583 were convicted criminals, according to an ICE document obtained by CBS News. However, the data also shows that most of the documented infractions were traffic or immigration offenses.
“Have you ever tried sugar or PCP?” --Mitch Hedberg
It makes perfect sense for deportees to be deported for immigration offenses–that’s basically THE reason to deport someone in a country. Don’t see anything controversial about that.
But it looks like “traffic” is thrown in (indeed, mentioned first) to make it sound more sensational–after all, that sentence is still technically accurate if it was 99% immigration offenses and 1% traffic offenses.
I got the feeling that if you considered traffic only, “most” would no longer be accurate, so I looked over the article. Lo and behold (or don’t), no figure at all for traffic at all. Not even a mention of it after that line.
I hate these underhanded rhetorical ‘maneuvers’–unfortunately, when the spin leads to a statement that makes the ‘right team’ look good, too many people happily swallow the result, no matter how disingenuous it might be.
It shouldn’t be only the ‘other team’ that pushes back against bullshit like this.
Yeah, I hate Trump and what he is doing but my very first thought was “this is a bullshit headline.”
Statistically speaking, only a tiny fraction of people living in America have ever committed murder. Even if we believed that every murder was committed by a distinct individual and no murderer ever committed a second murder, the 6/100,000 annual homicide rate means that 0.006 percent of americans commit murder every year. If 1% of the people being deported are convicted murderers, that means a deportee is 167 times more likely to be a murderer than the average person - in other words, murderers are much more likely to be deported than non-murders, but they are not the only ones being targeted. The headline could have been much less (deliberately) misleading if they just wrote “Despite Vows to ONLY remove worst offenders, ICE deported many whose worst crimes were traffic offences.” This would have been true and still bad.
Using the same assumptions as above, ICE could only deport 660 people each year (.006% * 11M undocumented immigrants) if they were truly committed to only deporting the “worst of the worst”. Since ICE’s daily quota is 3000, this is obviously a problem.
People watch way too much Dexter and believe that murder is much more common than it is.