Good news on immigration: Deportations up within interior of country

Finally some hard numbers via WaPo on the rising deportations from within the interior of the country -- AKA real deportations, not fake ones done by turning people back at the border.

From Jan. 22 to Sept. 9, officials deported nearly 54,000 immigrants from the interior, a 34 percent increase over the same period last year, and said that they expect the numbers to climb.

Total deportations during that period were about 143K, so real ones make up nearly 40%.

When they say they expect the "numbers" to climb, that means the count of those deported -- how could it not, as time goes on? Otherwise they mean the percent increase compared to Obama -- if it rose to a 45% or 55% increase or something, rather than 35%.

Other immigrations trends point in the other direction -- a narrowing of the difference compared to Obama over the last half year, since the Pentagon coup in April.

During the first several months of the administration, illegal border crossings were down 60-70%, but have doubled since April, so that whole period is only down 25%. That's still good news, but not the mind-blowing numbers from the early months, before the Establishment hijacking and purge of Trump supporters.

And that good news will only last a little while, as the Establishment stamps out even more of the Trumpists, and as the scare effect wears off in the minds of immigrants.

I expect the same month-by-month picture for real deportations -- a sharp rise compared to Obama during the pre-coup months -- maybe 90-100% -- and a gradual chipping away of that ramp-up during the post-coup months -- maybe 25% -- even if that still amounts to a 35% rise over the whole period.

Extrapolating into the near term requires this month-by-month picture. If the comparison to Obama has been fairly steady over the months, then we can expect sustained good-not-great news on real deportations. If, however, the comparison to Obama started yuge and has been muted by the stability-seeking Generals, the near term projection is for smaller and smaller gains over Obama, until the status quo ante is reached.

Also, even by recent standards, 54K real deportations is small. Obama's early administration deported nearly 4 times that many per year from the interior:

For now, immigration officials said that they are forging ahead with arrests, which are up more than 40 percent this year. But they acknowledged that sanctuary cities are making it difficult to increase the number of annual deportations to past levels.

From 2008 to 2011, which included part of President Barack Obama’s first term, officials deported more than 200,000 immigrants from the interior every year.

I'm upgrading the assessment of where immigration enforcement stands from not-hopeful to maybe-hopeful -- hopeful if we see data showing a sustained or even rising break from Obama, but back to not-hopeful if the majority of the gains were concentrated in a one-off event before the Establishment hijacking, and if things have been heading back toward how they used to be. That remains to be seen.