Immigration is supposed to be a big topic at tonight’s Republican debate. I wonder how they will address this?

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton says his agency deported nearly 400,000 individuals during the fiscal year 2011 that just ended in September.

Morton announced in Washington on Tuesday the number was the largest in the agency’s history.

ICE said about 55 percent of those deported had felony or misdemeanor convictions. Officials said the number of individuals convicted of crimes was up 89 percent from 2008. But officials could not immediately say how many of those crimes were related to immigration violations.

Bush’s last year in office we saw 350,000 deportations. Every year since Obama has been President that number has gone up. Of course the Republicans will dismiss that as being false numbers or claim it should be a much higher number. The big question though is how the Republicans plan to keep deportations high when all they want to do is get rid of revenue coming into the federal government?