The liberal media seeks to make political hay out of a new report that suggests Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is somehow soft on illegal immigration.
That would be the same Ron DeSantis who rerouted illegal immigrants to left-wing “sanctuary cities,” deployed National Guard troops and law enforcement officials to Texas to help Gov. Greg Abbott get a handle on the border crisis, and enacted one of the toughest E-verify requirements in the country for employers, among other steps.
Yes, DeSantis is so soft on this issue that just two months ago, after the tough E-verify law kicked in, the Associated Press lamented that for illegal immigrants in Florida, “daily life in recent months has become one governed entirely by fear.” These immigrants “found that daily routines have been upended for fear of being detained, separated from their families, and deported.”
Read: Florida Gov. DeSantis Announces Nationwide Anti-Illegal Immigration Coalition
Nonetheless, Newsweek last week picked up on a new Pew Research Center study that found “Florida was one of only two states that saw increases in their unauthorized immigrant populations between 2017 and 2021,” which was when former President Donald Trump was in the White House.
While the Pew report seems to serve Trump’s interests relative to fending off DeSantis’ challenge to his latest bid for a second term, the claims raise some questions.
For example, Pew claims that Florida had an estimated 80,000 more illegal immigrants in 2021 than in 2017.
“The only other state that saw an uptick in undocumented immigrants was Washington, with the vast majority of American states noting unchanged undocumented immigrant populations,” Newsweek continued.
“Florida’s proximity to Mexico, which is the source of 39 percent of the nation’s undocumented immigrants, may be at play here, but Mexico’s closest neighboring states like New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas failed to see their populations rise,” Newsweek added.
Interestingly, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas governors weren’t contacted to see if they believed the number of illegal immigrants remained “unchanged” during the years in question.
Still, it’s unclear why Pew highlighted two years when DeSantis, first elected in 2018, was not in office.
If we look at 2019 to 2021, the years when the terms of DeSantis and Trump overlap, the situation may look worse for DeSantis.
But it’s unclear if that’s the case at all.
This is because there are gaping holes that exist in the data for the Census Bureau, Pew, and even the illegal immigration hawks at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS): there is no reliable count for 2020.
Read: Governor Ron DeSantis Activates Florida National Guard To Stop Flow Of Illegal Migrants
CIS noted that Pew now relies on the bureau’s American Community Survey, which is a self-reported survey of U.S. households, for its estimates of the illegal population. But CIS also reports that there essentially was no survey in 2020 because of the pandemic.
In essence, no one knows what the illegal immigration effect was in 2020.
Even if we allow that illegal crossings dropped because of the pandemic, and perhaps Trump’s tough rhetoric, the Census Bureau data that Pew relied on show that illegal immigration surged by at least 300,000 people nationally from 2019 to 2021 (10.2 million to 10.5 million).
Of that total, Florida absorbed 125,000 illegals in those years.
Again, that may not look good for DeSantis on the surface, but the census data also show that the illegal population was not “unchanged” across the country between 2019 and 2021.
Instead, census numbers indicate a broad dispersion of the illegal immigrant population. At least 17 states, including Florida and Texas, reported higher populations of illegals in 2021 than they had in 2019.
According to the Cato Institute, that shift was largely attributable to Trump’s administration.
Read: Florida AG Ashley Moody Defends Immigration Law
As the libertarian Cato Institute reported, as Trump left office in January 2021, “Although Trump succeeded in cutting legal immigration more than he initially planned, he oversaw the collapse of interior immigration enforcement.”
“In 2020, the removal of illegal immigrants from the interior of the United States was the lowest as an absolute number and as a share of the illegal immigration population since ICE was created in 2003,” Cato reported.
“Trump failed to increase removals because local jurisdictions refused to cooperate with his administration, continuing a trend begun during the Obama administration in response to their deportation efforts. As a result, the population of illegal immigrants remained about the same as when he took office.”
In other words, for all his tough talk, Trump did little to change the equation on illegal immigration — because enforcement lapsed or because he failed to either persuade or punish those local jurisdictions that failed to go along.
Contrary to media reports, DeSantis could argue that if he has an “illegal immigration problem,” it’s because he’s trying to clean up a mess he inherited from the Trump administration and which was exacerbated by President Joe Biden’s administration.
In a statement to the Tampa Free Press, DeSantis’ Press Secretary Bryan Griffin said, “This is ridiculous — nobody has been stronger on curbing illegal immigration than Ron DeSantis. The entire media complex was running scare headlines just months ago about the new legislation he championed in Florida to address illegal immigration. He sent Florida assets to help secure the border, spearheaded legislation that increases penalties for those aiding illegal immigration in the state, set up highway interdictions, made E-Verify mandatory in Florida, and brought nationwide attention to our border crisis by flying 50 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Of all the candidates running, Ron DeSantis has the strongest and most detailed plan to build the wall and close the border once and for all.”
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