About one-in-six migrants sent back to Mexico (17%) were apprehended at work or at home in 2010, according to a recent Pew Hispanic Center analysis. The rise in home or work apprehensions is a pretty significant jump from previous years—in 2005, only 3% were apprehended at home or at work.
By contrast, a declining share of Mexican migrants report being apprehended at the border—25% in 2010, compared with 33% in 2005 and nearly half (49%) in 1995.
While the number of people crossing from Mexico into the United States has fallen to 40 year lows, the rates of deportation have reached historic highs.
“The new data unveils what we already knew: as migration wanes, immigration enforcement is shifting gears, moving increasingly to the interior of the United States and is targeting people who’ve lived here for long periods, have homes and jobs and families here,” said Colorlines.com’s investigative reporter Seth Freed Wessler.
“As previous Pew data shows, nearly two thirds of undocumented immigrants have lived in the country for more than a decade and nearly half have children here. Considering these shifting demographics, the fallout of the government’s insistence on deporting 400,000 people annually is likely to accumulate to toxic levels,” Wessler went on to say.
Many of those deported are parents who leave children behind. Between January and June of 2011, the United States carried out more than 46,000 deportations of the parents of U.S.-citizen children, according to federal data obtained by Colorlines.com’s publisher, the Applied Research Center.