Kris Kobach, Kansas secretary of State and immigration advisor to President-elect Donald Trump, explained the immigration figures Trump used on "60 Minutes."
During the interview, Trump claimed that there are upwards of 3 million illegal immigrants in the country that need to be deported.
"What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, where a lot of these people, probably 2 million, it could be even 3 million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate," Trump told CBS News' Lesley Stahl. "But we're getting them out of our country. They're here illegally."
According to Kobach, "that number actually comes from a 2013 report issued by the Obama Department of Homeland Security," he told CNN's Brianna Keilar. "It estimated that the number of criminal aliens living in the United States is 2 million. And that was — that report's three years' old. So President-elect Trump would be saying, it's probably gone up. So it's somewhere between 2 million and 3 million now."
Kobach blames the Obama administration for not allowing the deportation of criminals before they've been convicted. According to him, the Trump administration will probably "define criminal more broadly and not so narrowly and we're going to get these 2 million out, starting with that 193,000 we already have identified and then moving from there."
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