Thread: immigration delay means 60,000 to be deported by November

Obama immigration delay means 60,000 to be deported by November

Hispanics feel betrayed on deportation pledge


Setting it aside: President Obama’s delay of executive action on immigration likely will help a few Senate Democrats running for re-election but will hurt tens of thousands who face deportation. (Associated Press)

By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Sunday, September 7, 2014

Nearly 60,000 immigrants will be deported before November elections if the government holds its pace, and many of them might have earned tentative legal status had President Obama taken unilateral action to halt deportations.

Mr. Obama’s decision to put off any action until after midterm elections, which theWhite House leaked Saturday hours before he announced it himself in an interview with NBC, was mocked by Republicans and enraged immigrant rights groups, who said they felt betrayed after throwing their support to the president in the 2012 election.

In the near term, it could help several vulnerable Senate Democrats who feared that unilateral action by Mr. Obama doom their campaigns.

But outside such narrow partisan considerations, Mr. Obama’s decision managed to anger nearly everyone: Republicans who called it a cynical ploy, liberal Democrats who said they wished he had pressed forward, and immigrant rights activists who called it a cowardly move.

“Tens of thousands of human beings are likely to be separated from their families between now and the election,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, whose relationship with Mr. Obama grew testy over the summer as they sparred over how far the president would be willing to go to halt deportations.

“Their suffering, and that of their family members, who include U.S.-citizen children and spouses, should weigh on the consciences of each and every person responsible for this delay,” she said.

Mr. Obama imposed an end-of-summer deadline for taking some form of action to halt deportations. Among the options he was considering were expanding nondeportation policies to include illegal immigrants who have children who are already citizens of the U.S., and parents of so-called dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as minors and to whom Mr. Obama granted tentative status in 2012.

Republicans and some legal analysts have questioned whether Mr. Obama has the authority to make those moves.

In an interview taped Saturday for NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the president didn’t doubt his legal standing but said the timing, just ahead of congressional elections, was wrong. He said he needed to do more work to convince voters he is right.

He acknowledged that the surge of unaccompanied children across the U.S.-Mexico border, which he initially dismissed as a Central American problem, exposed holes in the U.S. immigration system.

“The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of that problem,” the president said. “I want to spend some time, even as we’re getting all our ducks in a row for the executive action, I also want to make sure that the public understands why we’re doing this, why it’s the right thing for the American people, why it’s the right thing for the American economy.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest denied last week that politics were playing a role in Mr. Obama’s thinking.

“That’s not what the president is focused on. What the president is focused on is trying to solve problems,” he said.

Mr. Obama’s decision to put off action suggests the White House still believes Democrats can win enough seats to preserve a majority in the Senate. Republicans would need to net six seats to win control.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who opposed unilateral action, called Mr. Obama’s decision cynical.

“The president isn’t saying he’ll follow the law — he’s just saying he’ll go around the law once it’s too late for Americans to hold his party accountable in the November elections. This is clearly not decision-making designed around the best policy — it’s Washington politics at its worst,” the Kentucky Republican said.

Senate Democrats, though, said blame should fall on Republicans, and particularly House leaders who refused to bring the Senate’s immigration bill to the floor for a vote. That bill would have granted a path to citizenship to almost all illegal immigrants in the U.S.

The Obama administration was deporting about 1,010 immigrants a day in the first half of the fiscal year. At that pace, it would deport nearly 60,000 more before Election Day.

Most of the estimated 11.5 million illegal immigrants have little fear of deportation. Indeed, a Washington Times analysis this year estimated that an illegal immigrant who has not crossed the border recently and doesn’t have a criminal record has less than a 1 percent chance a year of being deported.

But the weekend decision to delay action does reinforce long-standing questions immigrant rights advocates have had about Mr. Obama’s commitment — questions that date back to his days in the Illinois Senate and then as a U.S. senator, when he voted to build the border fence.

When Mr. Obama ran for president in 2008, he promised Hispanic audiences that he would fight for an immigration bill in his first year in the White House. Instead, his priorities were health care reform, the economic stimulus, addressing climate change and other issues.

Months before his re-election in 2012, Mr. Obama announced he would grant tentative legal status to young adults who came to the U.S. illegally as children, who completed a high school education and who had no criminal records.

More than a half-million illegal immigrants took advantage of that move, and Mr. Obama won an overwhelming percentage of the Hispanic vote in his re-election bid.

Some legal analysts questioned whether Mr. Obama had the legal authority to halt deportations, and a federal judge in Texas concluded it was illegal — though the judge ruled that he didn’t have jurisdiction over the case, leaving the president’s policies in place.

Activists had been calling on Mr. Obama to expand tentative legal status to include illegal immigrant parents of U.S. citizen children, and of the young adults who gained status under the 2012 policy.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...#ixzz3Cm2zhg2w

ILLEGAL ALIENS FURIOUS OVER 9 MORE WEEKS TO FEAR DEPORTATION WHEN MOST HAVE BEEN LEFT ALONE MORE THAN A DECADE

UPDATED: Mon, SEP 8th 2014 @ 12:10 pm EDT by Melanie Oubre

As the news spread that President Obama would delay his far-reaching executive order, pro-amnesty leaders and activists started ripping into the political move by the White House calling it a “betrayal” and a “slap to the face.”

Cristina Jimenez, director of United We Dream, an organization that’s top priority is now getting amnesty for non-DREAMers, had this to say to The Hill:

"To wait nine more weeks means that I must again look my mother in the eye and see the fear she has about living under the threat of deportation every day.”

The worries these activists have do not seem sincere when one looks at the numbers. The Pew Research Center just released a stunning study that directly contradicts this narrative.

If this Administration or the prior one instilled so much fear by deporting illegal aliens, then how do you explain that the overwhelming majority- 83%- has lived and worked in the US for at least a decade? That's over 8 million people who the Administration has promised time and time again it will do whatever it can to let them stay forever. Including but not limited to: prosecutorial discretion, deferred action, and the abolishment of US immigration enforcement practices.

Only 15% of illegal aliens in the country today have been here for less than 5 years. That figure was 38% in 2000. 62% have been here for at least 10 years compared to 35% in 2000. A whopping 21% have been here for at least 20 years.



The president defended the delay in an interview with Chuck Todd over the weekend. "The truth of the matter is that the politics did shift midsummer because of [the border surge]."
Never mind that the President’s favorite line when pushing comprehensive reform was to put "principles over politics"…

Or that he had two years to pass a comprehensive reform package when the Democrats controlled both the House and Senate but chose instead to wait and use immigration as a political football…

Don’t get me wrong- I am pleased that the White House has chosen to delay an order that will harm American workers. I hope in this 9 week span of time that some of the 18 million American workers living in fear of poverty and unemployment will find relief through full time work.

The fact that our President is waiting on this only to avoid reaction from the American voters should infuriate everyone- Republicans and Democrats alike. Instead of acting on principle and letting voters decide if they agree with you on that principle, he has chosen to leave us out of the discussion because he already knows where we stand. If there’s any betrayal here, it’s against the American electorate.

Pro-amnesty groups have promised to not forget this move by the President and neither should you. As Frank Sharry put it: “We advocates didn’t make the reform promise; we just made the mistake of believing it.” As did the millions of unemployed Americans who voted for the President in 2008 and 2012 hoping he would help them.

With all sides going after the President this fall on immigration, it seems he is backed into a corner and must pick who to stand with. We now have a couple of months to persuade him to strongly stand for American workers.

MELANIE OUBRE IS THE LOCAL ACTIVISM COORDINATOR FOR NUMBERSUSA

https://www.numbersusa.com/blog/open...erican-workers

“Tens of thousands of human beings are likely to be separated from their families between now and the election,” said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, whose relationship with Mr. Obama grew testy over the summer as they sparred over how far the president would be willing to go to halt deportations.

“Their suffering, and that of their family members, who include U.S.-citizen children and spouses, should weigh on the consciences of each and every person responsible for this delay,” she said.

It should weigh on their own conscience if they knew how to take personal responsibility for their actions. We didn't force them to come here, they chose to come here illegally. They chose to have anchor babies and they chose to risk separation.

Is that 60,000 including those turned back at the border? You know the same way they have been fudging the deportation numbers since BO got elected.

Even if it were deportations from the interior, at this rate it will take 24 to 83 years to completely rid ourselves of aliens. That would be also only if we have stopped letting them in. Any thing less than 500,000 a month from the interior will not be impressive in any means, ways, shapes or forms. Now with government letting in the contagious ill, added to their past performance, 500,000 deported a month is not unreasonable to demand!