Obama administration ‘cooking the books’ on deportation numbers!

Hot Air ^ | August 25, 2012 | Howard Portnoy

The news should come as no surprise considering it centers on an administration that double-counts $716 billion in order to claim that the Obamacare extends the solvency of Medicare while looting the entitlement’s trust fund. The Daily Caller reports:

Internal documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that the Obama administration has been ‘cooking the books’ in order to reach their ‘record’ number of deported illegal immigrants, chairman Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday.

Based on the internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents, the number of removals are actually down, the opposite of what the administration has been claiming.
This latest “fun with math” on the administration’s part artificially inflates the number of deportations by counting individuals “removed” from U.S. soil through the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP). ATEP is a program that moves apprehended illegal immigrants to another point along the border, sometimes as much as a thousand miles from where they crossed. The object is to discourage deportees from instantly re-trying a border crossing. The measure is also designed to create a hardship for them that will serve as a deterrent to them and others contemplating sneaking across the border.
Of the administration latest ploy, Smith said in a statement:
It is dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals. And these ‘removals’ from the Border Patrol program do not subject the illegal immigrant to any penalties or bars for returning to the U.S. This means a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year—and counted each time as a removal.
The DC goes on to note that given this new information, the committee’s Republican majority subtracted the ATEP removals from ICE’s deportation totals. The result is that the estimated 397,000 deportations for 2011 becomes approximately 360,000, and the 2012 removals to date drop from about 334,000 to an estimated 263,000.