While Congress is dithering about comprehensive immigration reform, President Obama’s enforcement team is hard at work deporting petty criminals who are here illegally.

In the fiscal year that ended in September, USA Today reports, Immigration and Customs Enforcement “deported 225,390 criminal immigrants — a record, and well above the agency’s target of 210,000.”

Previously, the administration had announced that ICE would focus on removing serious criminal offenders who were threats to society, and stop wasting border agents’ time with immigrants whose only crime is their presence in the United States. That doesn’t seem to have happened.

Although ICE is not saying how many of the record number of deportees were real criminals, and how many just ran stop signs or had busted tail lights, it seems pretty clear that a large number fell into the latter category. The USA Today article cited interviews and internal emails to suggest that agents were “trolling state driver’s license records for information about foreign-born applicants, dispatching U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to traffic safety checkpoints conducted by police departments, and processing more illegal immigrants who had been booked into jails for low-level offenses.”

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