South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg falsely claimed during the PBS/Politico 2020 Democrat presidential primary debate that deportation raids by federal agents do not make American communities safer.

While vowing to give reparations to illegal aliens, Buttigieg claimed Thursday evening that raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency “do not make our country safe.”

Research conducted by the State of New Jersey Commission of Investigation in 2018, though, revealed that mass deportations of illegal aliens helped liberate American communities of threats such as the MS-13 gang, which plagues neighborhoods from Virginia to Long Island, New York.

“In the 1990s and through the 2000s, law enforcement sought to counter MS-13’s growing influence by enlisting U.S. immigration authorities to deport tens of thousands of immigrants who had been convicted of crimes in the United States,” the report stated.

“The strategy proved a stopgap solution,” the report admitted of the mass deportation effort. “While it initially diminished MS-13 in California, it exported the gang’s culture to Central America…”

The research also discovered that cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement agencies helped not only deport illegal alien gang members, but also prosecute and lock up those nationals.

“Visible MS-13 activity in New Jersey has waned considerably in the past three years, the result of aggressive prosecutions at the state and federal levels and a close partnership with ICE,” the report noted. “Dozens of MS-13 members now sit in prison for crimes that include racketeering, conspiracy, and murder.”

There are anywhere between 11 million to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. at any given time. About eight million of those illegal aliens are working in the country, competing against America’s working and middle class for jobs and thus forcing down wages.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.