washingtonexaminer.com
By: Examiner Editorial
01/07/12 8:05 PM

On Friday, President Obama provided yet another example of his blatant willingness to ignore the Constitution's separation of powers, and this time it wasn't by making recess appointments when the U.S. Senate is not even in recess. The Department of Homeland Security published in the Federal Register a proposed new regulation that is the first major step in Obama's election-year strategy to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants, most of whom likely are Hispanics. And Hispanics just happen to be a voting group that is crucial to Obama's re-election prospects.

Essentially, the new regulation would hollow out a 1996 law that clearly set forth the current process by which an illegal immigrant can become a legal resident of the United States: Go back to your home country, wait three to 10 years (depending on how long you were in the U.S. illegally), and then apply for a green card. The 1996 law includes waiver provisions to cover situations involving "extreme hardship" on families, which are determined on a case-by-case basis. More than 70 percent of the 23,000 hardship applications received last year were approved.

But Obama has his eyes on millions of potential new Democratic voters, so now DHS wants to grant a hardship waiver to everybody whose spouse or parent is a legal resident of the U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano disingenuously categorized the rule change as representing a "focus on family unification consistent with Congress' prioritization in the immigration laws." Illegal immigrants would still have go back to their home countries to apply for a visa, but the provisional waiver would greatly reduce the time they had to spend there, turning what Congress intended as a punishment into little more than a vacation. For all practical purposes, the mass waivers amount to an amnesty, which Congress -- and the vast majority of the American people -- have repeatedly rejected because it would effectively nullify federal law.

Napolitano's feigned concern about separating immigrant families would be more believable if her department weren't simultaneously relaxing its policies on the detention and deportation of criminal aliens who prey on them. In late December, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that its agents would ignore deportation detainers from local law enforcement agencies until after a suspect's conviction "for the offense for which he or she was arrested" -- thus giving bond jumpers and plea bargainers a free pass.

Even if mass waivers were the best way to deal with the nation's enormous illegal immigrant problem, such a sweeping change of law and policy is the rightful domain of the people's elected representatives in Congress. The president and his appointees throughout the executive branch should stick to their constitutional role of enforcing -- not rewriting -- the law.

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