Https://factually.co/fact-checks/politics/ice-arrests-clinton-obama-era-history-and-policies-b63b73”
Executive summary
The claim framed by the Factually link asks whether ICE arrests and deportations under the Clinton and Obama eras differ meaningfully from later administrations; reporting shows Obama-era policy narrowed priorities toward criminals and recent crossers even as formal removals rose, but overall apprehensions and returns remained below Clinton/Bush-era peaks [1]. Contemporary analyses also document that ICE tactics and use of detainers shifted over time—rising in the Trump years and with a tilt toward community arrests—so simple comparisons of raw totals without policy context are misleading [2] [3].
1. How the Obama administration framed enforcement and what the numbers show
The Obama administration explicitly tightened enforcement priorities to focus on two groups—people with criminal convictions and recent border crossers—which the Migration Policy Institute says represented a significant departure from earlier administrations and produced higher formal removals even as apprehensions and overall deportations stayed far lower than under Bush and Clinton [1]. TRAC’s reporting and related contemporaneous accounts show Obama used the capacity to identify and remove unauthorized migrants and that by FY2016 ICE detained and deported tens of thousands, yet analysts emphasize it was a policy of targeted operations rather than broad sweeps that swept up bystanders [4] [5].
2. The debate over “who” was arrested: criminals vs. non-criminals
Multiple sources record a complex picture about criminality among those ICE arrested: the Obama-era guidance aimed to limit collateral arrests and prioritize public-safety threats, and NGO and media accounts noting targeted arrests under Obama contrast with later practices [4]. Analyses of later years—such as LEITF’s review of FY2020 data—show the arrested population across administrations contained many with criminal convictions or pending charges, but only a minority were aggravated felonies, underscoring differences in prioritization rather than a binary criminal/non-criminal split [6].
3. Tactics changed over time, altering arrest counts and public perception
How ICE counts arrests shifted with tactics: TRAC and other analyses document that use of detainers and the agency’s reliance on local jail processing rose before and then escalated under the Trump administration, and by contrast Obama-era operations were less likely to result in mass “collateral” detentions [2] [4]. The Washington Post’s analysis of later Trump-era operations shows a strategic shift away from jail-based arrests toward at-large, community-based apprehensions, which increases visible interior arrests and changes the headline statistics used in cross-administration comparisons [3].
4. Media framing and political reactions matter in interpreting the record
Media segments from 2016 showing ICE embedded reporting and subsequent conservative resurfacing of those pieces illustrate that coverage and ownership shifts influence perceptions of agency favorability, while advocacy groups and Democrats criticized specific Obama-era raid plans targeting families—highlighting how political actors and civil-society groups shape the narrative around enforcement even when policy details differ [7] [8]. This matters because selective reuse of footage or selective citation of totals without context can be used to argue disparate claims about who deserves blame or credit.
5. What can and cannot be concluded from the available reporting
Taken together, the sources support three firm conclusions: Obama narrowed enforcement priorities toward criminals and recent crossers [1], formal removals under Obama were high even as overall apprehensions and returns were lower than some prior administrations [1], and ICE’s tactics—including detainer use and community arrests—shifted over time, affecting arrest totals and visibility [2] [3]. What cannot be definitively concluded from the provided reporting alone is a single definitive ranking of “who did more deportations” without consistent metrics across years and administrations; different counts (apprehensions, returns, formal removals) and shifting definitions of detainers and interior arrests complicate direct one-to-one comparisons [1] [9] [2].