Amid President Donald Trump’s push for tighter immigration policies, the United States deported more than 256,000 illegal immigrants in 2018 – the highest number since the Obama administration, new data shows.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Deputy Director Ronald Vitello announced Friday that in the past fiscal year, which ended in September, ICE has detained “a record number” of illegal immigrants and that the number of those deported has risen about 13 percent since 2017. The data, which comes from a new agency report, shows that 145,262 of those who were deported were convicted criminals and that 22,796 had criminal charges pending against them.