There are two types of undocumented migrants who are the targets of President Donald Trump’s campaign to rid the country of some 11 million people who have been deemed undesirable and must be removed from the United States.

One category includes those who have committed crimes; the other includes those whose only offense is entering the country without official authorization. However, statements from the president and his advisers have tended to conflate the two groups, giving the impression that those migrants comprise a criminal class.

That, of course, is not the case. The American Immigration Council (AIC), in a report last October, noted a historical pattern of blaming foreign-born residents for any “crime surge” but stated that “a robust body of research shows that welcoming immigrants into American communities not only does not increase crime but can actually strengthen public safety. In fact, immigrants – including undocumented immigrants – are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born. This is true at the national, state, county and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime.”

Data from 1980 to 2022 – the most recent – “showed that, as the immigrant share of the population grew, the crime rate declined,” the AIC stated. In 1980, for example, when immigrants comprised 6.2 percent of the population, the overall total crime rate was 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people. By 2022, when the immigrant population doubled to 13.9 percent of the population, the total crime rate had dropped by 60.4 percent, to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people. Violent crime, fact, fell by 34.5 percent and property crime by 63.3 percent.

The AIC reported further that Uniform Crime Reporting data from the FBI and population data from the U. S. Census Bureau showed that, for the period 2017 to 2022, there was “no statistically significant correlation between the immigrant share of the population and the total crime rate in any state. This means higher immigrant population shares are not associated with higher crime rates, which aligns with a wealth of prior research on this topic.”

Such data are significant because the President made crimes by undocumented migrants a cornerstone of his three presidential campaigns and especially the most recent, last year, when he won election for a second time.

The data show, however, that migrants, including those who are undocumented, many of them living in the country for decades, have been focusing on making a life for themselves by establishing families, starting businesses, paying hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes and, in many cases, working at jobs which others do not want.

It is understandable that any Administration would want to put a lasersharp focus on rounding up and deporting those who commit crimes. They are not just a few; they number in the hundreds of thousands; and it should be no surprise that arrest, detention and deportation operations are directed at getting rid of them as a priority.

However, the ideal way to deal with those without a criminal record would be to let them remain in the country and continue to help build it. They want to see the United States continue to prosper so they can continue to prosper as well. One way of doing that would be to make them pay a fine for illegally entering the country and then set them on a path towards eventual citizenship. But a number of efforts to enact legislation to make that possible have failed, most recently when Trump used his influence with Republicans in Congress to defeat an enabling bill because he did not wish Democrats to chalk up a win, especially during an election season. His platform included expelling all the “illegals,” they are often derogatorily called.

But even if that is his policy objective, it can be done in a humane way that would allow them time to set their affairs in order and to wind down the life they have so far enjoyed – and, perhaps, try at a later stage to come back legally. It is evident, however, that such an approach is not being used and the result is sometimes heartbreaking.

Here are some examples: Paola Clouatre, a 25-year-old Mexican native with a 3-month-old infant whom she was breastfeeding, was arrested and deported, leaving her husband to care for the baby and another child.

Agents seeking migrants to deport set their sights on a state-funded children’s shelter in the Florida Keys, staking it out to catch undocumented parents who were expected to visit them.

Isidro Perez, a 75-year-old Cuban native who lived in the U.S. for 60 years, was taken to a detention facility in Miami, where he died three weeks later. His offense was marijuana possession 40 years earlier.

Madonna “Donna” Kashanian, 64, an Iranian native, was arrested while gardening outside her New Orleans home. She came in 1979 on a student visa and later had applied for asylum.

Several cases involve relatively minor traffic infractions, such as that of Felipe Zapata Velázquez, 27, of Colombia, a third-year undergraduate student at the University of Florida, who was detained and chose to leave voluntarily.

Maykol Bogoya-Duarte, an 18-yearold Detroit public school student, was deported to his native Colombia after being arrested for tailgating. He pleaded in vain to be allowed to stay at least until his graduation.