GANGS/ICE/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “President Trump claimed that his administration was deporting members of the gang ‘by the thousands.’ Data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows this is not possible…Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not break down deportations according to gang affiliation, a spokesman for the agency said. But based on the number of arrests alone, Mr. Trump’s estimate of ‘thousands’ is impossible. In the 2017 fiscal year — which began in October 2016 and ended in September 2017 — 796 members of MS-13, a transnational gang that has ties to El Salvador, were arrested, and 405 were arrested in the first quarter of the 2018 fiscal year, data that ICE provided to The New York Times shows. In all, that’s about 1,200 MS-13 members, and it’s likely not all of them have been removed. The time between an arrest and deportation can vary greatly, and backlog has stalled the process. In 2017, the average wait time for a hearing where a judge may order deportation was 685 days, according to data from TRAC, a research institute at Syracuse University. The number of MS-13 members who were arrested in the 2017 fiscal year was higher than the previous eight years, but ICE arrested more than 1,100 in the 2008 fiscal year and almost 1,300 in 2007. Those figures contradict Mr. Trump’s previous claims that ‘records’ were set.”
-Linda Qiu, “Trump Exaggerates Record on MS-13,” The New York Times online, May 30, 2018