Hillary Clinton has a strange way of criticizing Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown: bragging about how many people her husband and Barack Obama deported.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, Clinton argued that immigration enforcement has “gone too far” and needs to be “fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people.”
Then came the flex: “More people were deported under my husband and Barack Obama without killing American citizens and without putting children into detention camps than were in the first Trump term or this first year of Trump’s second term.”
Hillary Clinton:
— Clash Report (@clashreport) February 14, 2026
More people were deported under my husband and Barack Obama without killing American citizens and without putting children into detention camps than were in the first Trump term or this first year of Trump's second term. pic.twitter.com/SvziKGr8cx
The numbers back her up—sort of. Bill Clinton’s administration deported more than 12 million people across his two terms. Obama deported over 3 million between 2009 and 2017, earning him the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief” from immigration advocates at the time.
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security claims nearly 3 million “illegal aliens” have left the country in his second term, though only about 675,000 were actual deportations—the rest were “self-deportations,” whatever that means.
Clinton’s comments come as the Trump administration faces mounting backlash over two fatal shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis. Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both U.S. citizens, were killed weeks apart amid ramped-up ICE and Border Patrol operations. The killings have sparked widespread protests.
About three in five Americans now say the White House has “gone too far” with immigration enforcement, according to an AP-NORC poll.
Obama weighed in too, calling the “rogue behavior” of federal agents in Minneapolis “deeply concerning and dangerous” on an episode of Brian Tyler Cohen’s podcast. He described ICE agents “pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents” and “teargassing crowds simply who were standing there, not breaking any laws.”
But Obama also made clear he’s not exactly open borders. “The majority of the American people think that there’s a difference between somebody who’s a US citizen and somebody who’s not,” he said, “and that they want an orderly immigration system.”
So there you have it: the Democratic critique of Trump’s immigration policy isn’t that mass deportation is wrong—it’s that Democrats did it better and with fewer dead American citizens.