Percent of Obama's deportations had criminal background
Executive summary
The share of deportations under President Obama that involved people with a criminal conviction was a majority but not an overwhelming one: government and independent analyses show roughly 59% of deportees in FY2013 had criminal convictions, while other breakdowns and investigations by TRAC and the New York Times found that many cases categorized as “criminal” were for minor offenses such as traffic violations, and only about 20% of nearly two million cases across the administration involved convictions for serious crimes [1] [2].
1. The headline number: a majority with criminal convictions in FY2013
The clearest year-by-year figure available from independent researchers is that 59% of immigrants removed in FY2013 had at least one criminal conviction, a statistic produced by Pew using DHS data and widely cited in contemporaneous reporting [1] [3].
2. What “criminal” meant in practice: many were minor offenses
Analyses by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) and reporting summarized by the American Immigration Council found that two-thirds of nearly two million deportation cases involved people whose most serious offenses were minor infractions (including traffic violations) or who had no criminal record at all, and that only about 20%—roughly 394,000 cases—were for serious convictions such as major felonies [2].
3. The administration’s framing and DHS claims
The Department of Homeland Security and then‑ICE leadership publicly emphasized record numbers of convicted criminal alien removals—DHS announced large increases in removals of people they described as convicted criminals and touted programs like Secure Communities as producing tens of thousands of convicted criminal arrests [4].
4. Trends and nuance across years and data sources
Obama-era deportations peaked in the early 2010s—FY2013 saw roughly 438,421 removals—and aggregate removals over the administration exceeded two million, but the composition shifted over time; for example, interior removals were especially high early in the administration and later enforcement memos and local noncooperation changed the makeup of who was removed [3] [5] [6].
5. Procedural concerns and alternative interpretations
Civil‑rights and immigrant‑advocacy groups argued that fast‑track removal processes and classification practices produced inflated counts of “criminal” removals and sacrificed due process—ACLU documented that much of the removal system routed people through expedited procedures and warned this skewed the record toward speed over individualized fairness [7]. Independent data researchers (TRAC) and press analyses likewise highlighted that ICE’s internal categories included traffic and immigration offenses that many advocates and reporters do not treat as equivalent to violent or serious felony convictions [2].
6. Bottom line and limits of the record
The most defensible, data‑anchored answer is that a majority of deportations in the peak year FY2013 involved people with criminal convictions (about 59%), but when the “criminal” label is unpacked across the Obama era, much of that category consisted of minor offenses—so only about one‑fifth of the nearly two million cases were for what TRAC and the New York Times described as serious crimes [1] [2]. Different agencies and reports use different categories (ICE removals vs. CBP returns, conviction severity, and administrative fast‑track counts), so precise percentage comparisons across the whole administration depend on which dataset and definition of “criminal” a researcher uses [2] [4].