With Donald Trump reaffirming his strict stance on immigration in the wake of his win in the US Presidential election last week, critics and Hispanic groups claim that his position is more like that of current President, Barack Obama than many might think.
Advocacy groups who are against Trump have also slammed Obama as being the “deporter in chief” with the deportation of over 2.7 million undocumented immigrants during his first seven years in the White House. The deportation policy of the Obama administration ran parallel to attempts to allow other immigrants to have the legal right to remain in the US. Clarissa Martinez de Castro, of The Hispanic advocacy group, the National Council of La Raza’s, says that Obama has deported more individuals than any previous President.
On Sunday, Trump promised to deport up to three million undocumented immigrants with criminal records. But he appeared to be softening on his campaign promise to deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the US. The President-Elect’s ability to fulfil his promise is likely to be hindered by the limitations of the enforcement apparatus in the US and the constitutional requirement of providing a legal due process to all deportees, according to Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute.
Chishti says that immigration courts in the US are already clogged with a backlog of as many as 500,000 deportation cases and that there would have to be a huge expansion of law enforcement personnel.