President Trump’s “shithole” comment on immigrants from unspecified countries in Africa, as well as those from Haiti and El Salvador, is reflected in the numbers.
In the year after Trump took office, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has reported a drop in total number of overall “removals”—except for African migrants who have seen a spike in the number of people sent back home.
Quoting from Quartz Africa:
Even though overall removals dropped to 226,119 in 2017 from 240,255 in 2016, the number rose for Africans—in many cases, more than doubling from the previous year. The fiscal year data runs to Oct. 5 in each year.
For the top 10 African countries on ICE’s list, removals jumped by 140% to 1815 people removed in 2017, from 756 in 2016. Ironically, given Trump’s aggressive rhetoric about Mexico, the numbers of people sent back to Mexico and El Salvador dropped last year.
The agency describes removals as “removals and returns initiated by ICE and those initiated by other agencies” which includes “Voluntary Returns, Voluntary Departures, and Withdrawals Under Docket Control” but doesn’t provide a breakdown of the categories under which the illegal migrants would have returned.
