Daniel González

The Republic | azcentral.com

Under President Barack Obama's administration%2C the U.S. has exceeded 2 million deportations.

The milestone means Obama's administration has deported more people than any other president's.

Reform advocates want Obama to stop deporting some immigrants until Congress takes action.

President Barack Obama has repeatedly declared himself a champion of immigration reform, including a legalization program for millions of immigrants in the country illegally.

But among some immigration-reform supporters — historically Obama's political allies — the president has been branded the opposite: "deporter in chief."

Cardinal, bishops hold Mass at borderThat reputation has been further cemented by a milestone being protested today by immigrant advocates in Arizona and around the country: Under Obama's administration, the U.S. has exceeded 2 million deportations.

The milestone is significant because it means Obama's administration has deported more people than any other president's.

What's more, it took Obama's administration just over five years to exceed the 2 million deportations that took place under all eight years of President George W. Bush's administration, which set the previous record after ramping up deportations following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

"I think what you are seeing from more and more Americans is that 'Wait a minute. This is too much.' It has gotten out of hand. It's got to stop," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a Washington, D.C., group that advocates for immigration reform.

"The fact (is) that you have a president who spoke movingly about the pain of family separation and the priority he would put on passing immigration reform as a candidate, and yet to date his legacy is 2 million deportations and no immigration reform legislation," Sharry said.

He said it speaks to the unwillingness or inability of Obama "to turn things around administratively" and Republicans to "do what the majority of the country wants legislatively."

In March, Obama directed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to review the nation's immigration system to see how deportations can be handled more "humanely" within the confines of the law.

Sharry, who met with Obama in March with other reform advocates, said the president made clear that if Congress doesn't pass an immigration reform bill by June, he will take some kind of action on his own.

"How big and how bold is unknown," Sharry said.

Still, advocacy groups will be holding rallies, marches and street demonstrations in 80 U.S. cities today to keep the pressure on Obama to stop deporting immigrants. They especially hope to protect those that might be eligible to stay in the country legally if Congress were to approve reforms such as the bipartisan bill the Senate passed in June, which Republican leaders refused to consider in the House.

One local group, Puente Movement, plans to rally outside an immigration detention center in Eloy today, capping a three-day, 60-mile march from Phoenix to Eloy to call attention to the record-setting deportations.

The deportations are "traumatizing our community," said Carlos Garcia, an organizer with the group. "There are children who no longer have their parents. I don't even have the words to say it. The range of people who are getting caught up and deported is affecting a huge spectrum of our community."

Puente supporters are also calling on ICE to release five immigrants with long ties to the U.S.

One of them, Jaime Valdez Reyes, 31, was deported to Mexico on Feb. 25. He is being held in a detention center after entering through the border crossing in Nogales on Tuesday and asking for humanitarian parole in the U.S.

In an interview with The Republic at a shelter in Nogales, Sonora, before he crossed, Valdez accused ICE of hastily deporting him in retaliation for taking part in a hunger strike at the Eloy detention center, where he was held for several months before he was sent back to Mexico.

Garcia said although Valdez "has made some mistakes," he shouldn't be deported because he has lived in the U.S. since he was 14.

ICE officials said Valdez was deported after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied his request for a stay of removal. They said his criminal history includes two DUI convictions.

Inflating numbers?

The 2 million deportation milestone was actually reached months ago. As of March 8, the Obama administration had deported 2,087,456 people since fiscal 2009, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement statistics.

By comparison, the U.S. deported 2,012,539 people under Bush; 869,646 people under President Bill Clinton; 141,326 under President George H.W. Bush; and 168,364 people under President Ronald Reagan, according to ICE statistics.

While Obama is being criticized by reform advocates for deporting so many people, he also has come under fire from supporters of stricter immigration enforcement who accuse his administration of inflating deportation numbers to make it appear that he is tougher on immigration enforcement than he is.

An October report by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., research organization that supports tough immigration enforcement, said Obama's administration was inflating deportation numbers by including illegal immigrants arrested by the Border Patrol and turned over to ICE custody.

In fiscal 2012, when deportations hit an all-time high of 409,849, more than half of the removals attributed to ICE were the result of Border Patrol arrests, the CIS report said.

Last year, 235,093, or 64 percent, of the 368,644 people deported by ICE had been apprehended along the border while trying to enter the U.S. illegally, according to ICE statistics. The remainder were apprehended in the interior of the U.S., according to ICE.

"This accusation that (Obama) is the 'deporter in chief' is based on false assumptions that deportations have gone up," said Jessica Vaughan, author of the report.

Marc Rosenblum, a deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, D.C., said a large number of Border Patrol arrests are rightly counted as ICE deportations because of stepped-up enforcement programs that pursue criminal charges against immigrants caught entering illegally instead of merely sending them back across the border.

The criminal charges are intended to impose consequences on immigrants who enter illegally to discourage illegal immigration, he said.

In March, Vaughan published another report accusing the Obama administration of not pursuing deportation cases against 68,000 immigrants with criminal convictions encountered by ICE. In response, Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., on Thursday sent a letter to Johnson, the DHS secretary, asking him to explain why they were released.

Levin chairs the Senate's permanent subcommittee on investigations. McCain is the subcommittee's ranking member.

The two senators also asked Johnson to explain why more than 26,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records were released instead of deported between 2008 and 2011.

The letter cited a Congressional Research Service report that found that after their release, the immigrants "committed nearly 58,000 crimes, including 59 murders, 21 attempted murders, more than 4,000 major felonies and 1,000 other violent crimes."

Amber Cargile, a Phoenix spokeswoman for ICE, said deporting criminals is the agency's "highest priority." She said in a statement that ICE deported 216,000 convicted criminals last year, and the percentage of criminals removed by the agency continues to rise.

"Nearly 60 percent of ICE's total removals had been previously convicted of a criminal offense, and that number rises to 82 percent for individuals removed from the interior of the U.S.," Cargile said.

Opposing scalebacks

The pressure for Obama to halt some deportations continues to mount.

Last week, former acting ICE Director John Sandweg suggested that one way to slow deportations would be for ICE to stop making it a top priority to deport non-criminal immigrants caught illegally re-entering the country or staying in the country after being ordered to leave.

Such immigrants tend to have long ties in the U.S., Sandweg said.

"Taking them off the priority list would dramatically advance the president's goal of a more humane enforcement system and would enhance public safety and border security," Sandweg wrote in an opinion column published in the Los Angeles Times.

Vaughan, at the Center for Immigration Studies, said doing that would be "a huge mistake."

"It would be an open invitation for people who have been deported to come right back," she said, which would "undermine" the nation's immigration laws.

U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who supports immigration reform and helped craft the bill passed by the Senate, said he is opposed to the Obama administration unilaterally scaling back deportation policies, saying it would make passing immigration reform that much more difficult.

"One of the biggest problems we have is convincing our colleagues that the president will enforce the new law," Flake said. "There's just not a lot of confidence that this administration will enforce the law, and this just feeds that narrative."

McCain, who also supports immigration reform, agreed.

"If he carries that too far, it's harder for me to get Republican support (for immigration-reform legislation) because of him basically ignoring the law, if he's going to."

Reporters Dan Nowicki and Bob Ortega contributed to this article.