Donald Trump is deporting fewer people than Barack Obama did

ON THE morning of October 4th Gwen and Rossyo Barrios Mendoza, two teenage sisters, were scurrying around their family’s small home in Santa Ana. They ate cereal, fed the chickens and got their bags ready for school while their four siblings snoozed. Then they waved goodbye to their father, Israel, as he backed his grey pickup truck out onto their sunny street and began driving towards the building site where he worked as a house-framer. A minute or two later Gwen received a call. It was her father, and his voice sounded shaky: “Gwen—I’ve been arrested. They’re going to leave my truck on the street around the corner. Have your mom come get it.”

Mr Barrios Mendoza is now being held in a detention centre in the Joshua tree-studded California high desert. His children, all six of whom were born in America, had worried about something like this happening to their father, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, ever since Donald Trump was elected president. While campaigning, Mr Trump had promised to “round up” and remove all 11m undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in America. It was an impossible vow to keep, but the country still braced for an onslaught of deportations.