Recently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been posting unrealistic deportation numbers, suggesting that 2.2 million immigrants have “voluntarily self-deported” and that the White House’s mass deportation operation has deported 675,000 people. However, several independent nonpartisan groups have disputed these claims, arguing that 3 million people leaving a country would be felt across multiple sectors, particularly labor markets
While the Center for Migration Studies says the 675,000 “may well be accurate,” that total is unvalidated, and the 2.2 million self-deportations is just not true for various reasons. Researchers at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) and the Deportation Data Project put the number of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations at somewhere between 290,000 and 350,000. The self-deportation numbers come in at about one-tenth of what DHS claims.
“The DHS allegation of close to 2 million self-deportations under the Trump administration—roughly equivalent to 15% of the estimated total population of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S.—would amount to about 200,000 people per month having voluntarily left the country, an exodus not likely to have gone unobserved,” reads the Center of Migration Studies analysis.
So why lie about these numbers? Aside from the obvious attempt to make it appear that their policies are more successful than they are, the rest of the story revolves around bolstering the lies that are steeped in Latinophobic and anti-Black xenophobia. For more than a decade, bigots surrounding Trump, who made a name for themselves promoting far-right Klan-like bigotry, have helped boost outright racism and xenophobia. Mainstream media failed to keep up with it and failed to fact-check many of the claims that were growing in right-wing politics.
Claims about migrants not being vetted or medically screened at the border, criminality, and the use of social services, for example, were not pushed back on nearly enough. In many cases, media outlets let these claims be made without any correction, embracing far-right language like “illegal alien” in the process. They never adequately addressed the false idea that immigrants are criminals for simply crossing the border, a narrative that helped bolster the “all immigrants are criminals” rhetoric from the Trump camp.
These portrayals are being used today to rationalize violence from agents of myriad agencies conducting deportation operations. Narratives that are often used to convince agents they are different from the people they are targeting, whether the agent is White, Black, Latino, or otherwise. It dehumanizes migrants as “lesser than” to members of an agency built on the idea of white supremacy. This manipulation can be seen in the agents at ICE or Border Patrol, but it also highlights how civilians are also convinced that people should be extracted from society.
To maintain these narratives, the white nationalist has to continue to pretend these decades-old lies are true. It does so by preserving the lies they created. Now that they have power again, maintaining the lie means targeting immigrants and portraying all of them as criminals. As any fascist dictator throughout history, the goal is to portray themselves as the heroes who fought back a manufactured enemy with manufactured results.
In doing so, the well-funded perpetrators of this hatred for nonwhite people will likely continue to be bolstered for years to come as they try to continue bragging about solving problems that didn’t exist. They’ll do this by glossing over the pardoning of violent criminals, drug smugglers, and protecting countless wealthy, elitist, sexual offenders found in the Epstein files. This is what agents of white supremacy are good at and have always done. They protect their own, no matter how vile they may be, while villainizing nonwhite people both at home and abroad.
Meanwhile, they show no regard for the people they kill on our streets, in detention centers, or in a foreign country. It’s a white savior complex that upholds white supremacist values built on genocide, murder, destabilization, and outright war. When DHS lies about the success of its operations while using manufactured deportation numbers, it’s bolstering the same system that revolves around state-sanctioned violence and exploitation that are foundational to everything the United States has ever done or plans to do.
Even its own citizens aren’t safe.
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