(Ben Sellers, Headline USA) A former Justice Department statistician used left-wing media’s own figures against them to reveal that former President Barack Obama’s error rate while deporting illegal immigrants was nearly three times that of President Donald Trump.
John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and a former DOJ senior adviser for research and statistics, published an op-ed in the New York Post on Wednesday that used figures from ProPublica and NPR to show the double standard surrounding the Left’s reactions to recent deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Links to all the facts and more details can be found here. https://t.co/b0uQa5yBU2
— John R Lott Jr. (@JohnRLottJr) January 24, 2026
“No federal agency is perfect,” Lott wrote.
“In immigration enforcement, as in all law enforcement operations, mistakes will be made,” he added. “But the media’s lack of perspective on the data, and their refusal to put the numbers in context, is putting a match to an explosive public debate.”
In analyzing mistaken arrests and detention of U.S. citizens, Lott noted the stats cited by a Hill reporter who recently confronted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
“Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year; 170 US citizens were detained by ICE,” said reporter Niall Stanage. “And, uh, Renee Good was shot in the head and killed … How does that equate to them doing everything correctly?”
Lott’s analysis, in response, broke down both mistaken detentions and accidental deaths connected with ICE’s law-enforcement activity.
“Overall, the error rate under Obama was 3.36 times higher than under Trump,” he wrote.
Obama, during the years 2015 and 2016, oversaw 263 mistaken arrests, 54 mistaken detentions and four mistaken removals. That amounted to an error rate of 0.0225% for a total of 239,645 arrests, Lott noted.
In his first year alone, Trump’s ICE made nearly 2.5 times the number of arrests in half the time, while his error rate was only 0.0067% out of some 595,000 arrests.
Lott said that from 2009 to 2017, spanning Obama’s two terms, 56 individuals died in ICE custody, compared with 32 for Trump in 2025.
“That claim, however, misleads without context; the numbers only make sense when compared across administrations,” Lott wrote.
When viewed as a percentage of total ICE encounters, the figures once again show that Trump’s overall mortality rate was 0.0054%, compared with Obama’s 0.007%.
He pointed out that the Obama numbers were a rough estimate since the administration did not keep reliable data on ICE detentions until its final two years.
But to Obama’s credit, even his detainees died at a lower than average rate when compared with the control group of similarly aged non-detainees.
“Both those figures are substantially below the average death rate for the detainee age group,” Lott said.
Lott also pointed to a third metric: accidental deportations of Americans. He noted that the Hill reporter conveniently omitted that in his briefing-room diatribe against Trump’s first-year deportations.
“The reason for him not doing so is straightforward — none occurred,” Lott wrote. “That’s right, for all the tumult and fury, ICE under Trump made no erroneous deportations through November.”
Obama, by contrast, accidentally deported four Americans during his final two years in office.
Lott’s stats, which ended with data collected in November 2025, did not factor in the recent collateral damage in Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey have encouraged violent resistance since the Jan. 7 shooting death of Renee Good after she assaulted an ICE agent with her vehicle.
On Saturday, following publication of Lott’s piece, a second ICE shooting took the life of Alex Pretti after Pretti’s firearm apparently discharged during a physical clash with ICE agents.
Immigration enforcement advocates have argued that those attempting recklessly to interfere with ICE’s targeted arrests and endangering the lives of agents — an issue that Obama’s immigration enforcement did not encounter — are assuming the inherent risks against their own safety.
The “demonization tactics” by seditious left-wing lawmakers like Walz and Frey “are making federal agents’ jobs considerably more dangerous,” Lott wrote.
Some have speculated that Walz, the running mate of failed 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris, may be using the violent anti-ICE resistance to distract from allegations that he was complicit in a massive fraud operation involving the Minneapolis Somali community.
After independent journalist Nick Shirley’s viral report on the fraud broke last month, Walz was forced to abandon his own gubernatorial reelection campaign.
Ben Sellers is a freelance writer and former editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.
