Trump's threatened deportations - and Obama's actual ones

For those of us who worried for the last eight years about President Obama's fondness for Bipartisanship, Donald Trump's election gives us repeated occasion for deep, weary sighs.

Like Trump's promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. One of the BBC Mundo articles uses "irregular" instead of "undocumented." The threat being bandied about right now is to deport three million with criminal records. Not surprisingly, that estimate seems to be anywhere from four to ten times the available estimates that are worth considering as serious for undocumented immigrants. There may be more legal immigrants with some kind of criminal background. Minor offenses on ones record are not a ban to American citizenship.

What progressives are pointing out, and what rightwingers will toss back at those of us who object to Trump's deportations is that in his two terms in office, the Obama Administration has apparently deported at least three million. Gerardo Lissardy reports that the Administration deported 2.5 million between 2009 and 2015.

• ¿De dónde sacó Donald Trump el número de hasta 3 millones de indocumentados que dice querer deportar de Estados Unidos? BBC Mundo 14.11.2016
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• Gerardo Lissardy , Estados Unidos: así se compara el anuncio de deportaciones de Trump con el récord de deportados de Obama BBC Mundo 14.11.2016

Of course, the people who are most concerned about Trump's anti-immigrant deportation threats were also complaining about Obama's level of deportations.

Still, that doesn't mean we can't make real distinctions between what happened during the Obama Administration and whatever it is Trump may do, when appropriate.

For instance, deporting three million people within one or two years would be a whole different operation in terms of scope, intensity and bad consequences.

Still, even though Obama has taken measures to protect some categories of undocumented immigrants, like the mothers of American citizen children, in his first years in office he pushed deportation and border-fence building, justifying it as a Bipartisan way to get the Republcians to agree to comprehensive immigration reform. Whether he actually thought that was feasible or it was just an excuse to tell Democrats, the results are the same: no comprehensive immigration reform and the Republican Party doing major demagoguery over it.

Obama's deportations, as Lissardy reports, are a Presidential record. He notes that some Latino leaders refer to Obama as the Deporter-in-Chief.

I wonder if that may have affected the enthusiasm among the Latino community for voting for Hillary Clinton, who was clearly campaigning to have Obama's Third Term.

Unfortunately, Obama's deportation record means that Jimmy Dore's prediction in this report may not be off the wall, although I'm not nearly as optimistic on that score as he is, PREDICTION: Trump Will Deport LESS Immigrants Than Obama The Young Turks 11/13/2016: