The White House has defended a four-fold increase in the deportation of undocumented immigrants for minor crimes such as driving offences, insisting it is simply complying with “administration priorities” by removing foreign law-breakers from the country.



Campaigners leaped on the new data, obtained under Freedom of Information Act requests by the New York Times, as evidence the Obama administration has stepped up deportations to convince Republicans it can be trusted to enact wider immigration reform.

But with congressional reform efforts stalled, activists are now planning to target their protests against the administration instead, saying it has made matters worse by trying to appease Republican opponents.



“The irony is that this was tactic that Obama and his administration used to show they were tough on immigration and enforcement but somewhere along the line they seem to have lost track of the very reason why they moved so aggressively,” Kica Matos, director of immigrant rights at the Center for Community Change, told the Guardian.

“They focused only on enforcement and did not devote anywhere near the same amount of energy to advancing comprehensive immigration reform legislation as they did to, say, healthcare reform.”



The New York Times investigation found two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases it studied involved people who had committed minor infractions or had no criminal record.



The number of cases relating to people whose most serious offence was a traffic violation has quadrupled, rising from 43,000 over the last five years of George W Bush's presidency to 193,000 since Obama took office.



The White House insisted on Monday that its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division was mostly complying with guidelines requiring laws to be broken before undocumented immigrants are deported.



“Ninety-eight percent of ICE's total removals last year met one more of the agency's civil immigration enforcement priorities,” said spokesman Jay Carney. “Other than convicted criminals, priorities include those apprehended while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States, illegal re-entry, and fugitives from immigration court.



He said 82% of those removed from the interior of the US were previously convicted of a criminal offence and 72% were convicted of more serious crimes involving violence or property theft.



However Carney acknowledged that the one of the challenges of such guidelines is that anyone caught attempting to re-enter after being removed is automatically guilty of a felony, a more serious class of crime.



Ninety-three percent of all ICE's non-criminal removals were recent border crossers, repeated immigration violators or fugitives from immigration court, he said.



Campaigners argue that such rules rip hundreds of thousands of American families apart, since many undocumented immigrants have been settled in the US for decades and have family dependents who are left devastated by something as minor as running a red light.



“They are trying to find a way to mitigate the horror of what Obama has done over the last eight years,” said Matos, who accused the White House of “playing a public relations game”.



“You can bet your bottom dollar that we are well on the way to escalating [our protest campaign],” she added. “Last year we included civil disobedience. The biggest difference this year is that our protests are targeted more and more at the Obama administration.”



Two weeks ago, the White House announced a review of deportation practices by Homeland Security director Jeh Johnson and has asked campaigners to hold off from public criticism and give it 90 more days to try to convince Republicans in the House of Representatives of the need for wider immigration reform.