WASHINGTON — On Wednesday, *Migrant Insider* asked White House border czar Tom Homan why he deported more migrants as Barack Obama’s ICE director than he has during either Donald Trump administration.
Homan said Obama relied on accounting gimmicks, like counting Border Patrol removals as ICE removals, to drive up his presidency’s migrant removal statistics. As a result, Obama deported more migrants than any president in American history, including Trump, who Homan now serves. In 2015, Unidos CEO nicknamed Obama the “Deporter-in-Chief”, a handle that has endured in migrant advocacy circles.
“We got honest numbers,” said Homan of the current administration’s effort, before pivoting to widely disproven talking points stating that the Trump administration is detaining and deporting mostly ‘criminal’ migrants. In fact, beyond existing illegally in the U.S. (a civil, non-criminal infraction), 40,643 out of 56,816—or 71.5% held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction according to the latest TracReports [data](https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/) current as of July 13, 2025.
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Editor’s Note: Migrant Insider has made a concerted effort to record, produce, and publish videos of some of our interviews with lawmakers, adminstration officials, migrants and advocates. We post them on IG (mostly) and more-recently TikTok. Please follow us there if you haven’t already.
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