Despite political rhetoric, Trump’s deportees are more likely to be students and teachers than violent criminals
Donald Trump won’t move back into the White House for several more weeks yet, but Gov. Greg Abbott and Trump’s other leading supporters in state government already are chomping at the bit to assist the president-elect – and share some of the dubious limelight – in carrying out Trump’s long-promised plans for “mass deportations” of immigrants.
In the process, they aren’t above spreading Trump’s often-repeated, hate-tinged lie that many, if not most, immigrants are dangerous criminals whose forced departure will make America safer again.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was down in Starr County on the southern border, where she already had offered the incoming administration use of about 1,400 acres of newly acquired state property to use as a site for migrant detention centers.
In a letter to Trump, subsequently reported by the news media, Buckingham said her agency was “fully prepared” to enter into an agreement with the federal government for the property to be used for the “processing, detention and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”
Baloney.
Buckingham cited the death of a 12-year-old girl from Houston, who police say was killed by two men who were in the country illegally. A murder is a tragedy regardless of who commits it. But murders – as well as other crimes — in the United States are much more likely to be committed by a U.S. citizen, not by an undocumented immigrant, the National Institute of Justice concluded in a study published in September.
The study, based partly on arrest records in Texas, found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.
Looking at Texas alone, the Cato Institute reported that undocumented immigrants make up about 7.1 percent of the state’s population but accounted for only 5 percent of all homicide convictions in 2022.
Trump may give priority, at least at first, to deporting convicted criminals. But if, as he has promised, the forced removal continues, most of the deportees will not be violent criminals but people guilty only of seeking a better life in the United States than they or their parents had in the countries from which they came.
They will include construction workers and other laborers who have been helping to fuel our economy – often taking jobs most U.S. citizens won’t touch — after escaping poverty, strife and/or danger in their home countries. They also will include students in our public schools whose families came to the United States – often on difficult, dangerous journeys — to build a better future for their children.
And if Trump succeeds in ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as he has threatened, the deportees will include thousands of schoolteachers, health care workers and other professionals, as well as successful businesspeople, most of whom have made significant contributions to the only country they have ever called home.
In other words, they will be people like the rest of us, trying to take care of their children and other loved ones, plan their futures and peacefully live their everyday lives – until they became Donald Trump’s targets.
