Speaking at a panel on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chimed in on the topic of global migration and border enforcement.
“More people were deported under my husband [Bill Clinton] 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,” she said. Some in the crowd applauded.
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“There is a legitimate reason to have a debate about things like migration,” Clinton added. “It went too far, it’s been disruptive and destabilizing, and it needs to be fixed in a humane way with secure borders that don’t torture and kill people.”
A hawkish border take from a lifelong centrist Democrat? She must be running again.
Personally, I take everything Clinton says with a grain of salt ever since her team claimed that she was just like my abuela during her failed 2016 presidential campaign. Naturally, I was dubious of her assertion that the immigration policies of former Presidents Clinton and Obama were humane, especially when history shows otherwise.
So I pulled some receipts!
Bill Clinton
Perhaps no other president in the history of the United States has contributed more to the country’s current detention and deportation apparatus than the only commander in chief to hail from Arkansas.
In 1994, the Clinton administration implemented an immigration enforcement strategy known as “prevention through deterrence,” which resulted in miles of fence built along the U.S.-Mexico border and increased personnel at major points of entry — “Operation Gatekeeper,” which targeted the San Diego sector, was part of this effort. The idea was to push unauthorized migration into unfriendly terrain in hopes that the hostile conditions would deter people from crossing. That didn’t happen. People still tried to cross.
“One unintended consequence of this enforcement posture and the shift in migration patterns has been an increase in the number of migrant deaths each year; on average 200 migrants died each year in the early 1990s, compared with 472 migrant deaths in 2005,” a 2009 report by the Congressional Research Service found.
Being forced to traverse the Sonoran desert in search of a better life isn’t exactly the textbook definition of “humane.”
Two years later, Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, significantly increasing the number of people eligible for deportation while also making it harder for undocumented individuals to obtain legal status. IIRIRA also created the 287(g) program, which allows federal immigration officials to deputize local and state law enforcement agencies to detain undocumented immigrants. During his second term, Donald Trump has significantly expanded the program.
To learn more about the legacy of IIRIRA, I recommend this comprehensive explainer published by Vox in 2016.
Barack Obama
Contrary to what Hillary Clinton claimed in Munich, Obama did put children into detention camps.
In 2014, the number of unaccompanied minors coming from the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala) significantly increased. According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s own data, the department apprehended 68,445 unaccompanied children under the age of 18 during the 2014 fiscal year. In 2013, that figure was 38,759 apprehensions.
So dire was the situation that The Times editorial board deemed it to be “a humanitarian issue that is beyond the power of a single government to control.”
It wasn’t just unaccompanied minors. Adults with children also showed up at the border seeking refuge. In turn, the Obama administration rushed to build detention centers to hold families that had arrived illegally. Among these was the South Texas Family Residential Center, also known as the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.
The Dilley detention center, which is operated by for-profit prison contractor CoreCivic, was closed in 2024, but was reopened in 2025 by the Trump administration. Dilley has been in the news a lot lately. It’s where Liam Conejo Ramos — the 5-year-old boy whose picture went viral — and his father were taken after being detained in Minnesota.
Earlier this month, ProPublica published a troubling report about conditions inside the detainment center based on letters it received from children inside Dilley. They describe the poor medical access and rancid food they’ve been given, the despair and anguish they’ve felt.
“I have friends, school, and family here in the United States,” 13-year-old Gustavo Santiago wrote of his experience. “To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained. I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”
Thanks, Obama. Dilley is as much a part of his legacy as the well-earned moniker “deporter in chief.”
Joe Biden
Clinton didn’t mention him in her comments, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Joe Biden.
During his presidential campaign, Biden promised that he would bring “human dignity” to the U.S. immigration system. After taking office, he continued Donald Trump’s policy of invoking Title 42, an obscure public health statute from 1944 that allows the president to deny entry into the United States to foreign nationals who might spread a communicable disease (remember COVID-19?), to immediately expel people into Mexico.
Biden’s usage of Title 42 was bad for immigrants but good for those seeking to exploit them.
“The consequence of Title 42 is that this is essentially a gold rush for human smugglers,” immigration lawyer Andrew Free told The Times in 2021.
The Biden administration also gave us the following image from September 2021, which shows a horse-mounted Border Patrol agent violently pulling on the shirt of a Haitian refugee near Del Rio, Texas.
As I wrote back then, the image perfectly encapsulated the violence undocumented migrants crossing the border have faced over the last three decades.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent on horseback tries to stop a Haitian migrant from entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande near the Acuna Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 19, 2021.
(Paul Ratje / AFP via Getty Images)
Hillary Clinton is not wrong to call out Donald Trump’s horrific and cruel immigration enforcement efforts. And credit where credit is due: No U.S. citizen has been publicly killed for defending their immigrant neighbors. But if that’s where the bar is, then it’s on the floor, and as history has shown, Democrat presidents have long struggled to clear it.
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(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)
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The theme for the night is “Starting Fresh.” All stories must be true and set in the Greater L.A. area. If you would like to participate, you can apply via this audition form. But hurry, you only have until midnight Sunday to be considered!
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