A New Deportation Policy?
Earlier this year, the House of Representatives dismissed a comprehensive immigration reform bill entitled “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013”, which sought to establish a five-year route to lawful permanent residence, followed by citizenship, for illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children. While many initially perceived this action as a death blow to immigration reform in the near future, some Republicans are now considerably concerned that the president will take executive action to bypass the congressional gridlock and institute his own revisions to U.S. policy. The White House recently confirmed that it, in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security, had commenced a reexamination of its administrations unprecedentedly pervasive deportation policy. One change being thoroughly entertained by the Obama administration is one that would effectively make noncriminals and minor offenders the lowest deportation priorities. Though the president has declined to elaborate on when said policy reforms might be enacted, many, including Senator Marco Rubio, fear that this reassessment indicates his willingness to act unilaterally on the issue of immigration reform.
If Obama were to utilize his executive prerogative to take actions into his own hands, it would mean the further exacerbation of tensions between his administration and the GOP-dominated house. House Speaker John Boehner predicts that such action by the president would “make it almost impossible to ever do immigration reform, because he will spoil the well to the point where no one will trust him by giving him a new law that he will implement the way the Congress intended.” Is the immediate implementation of reform really worth inciting additional antagonism and, consequently, increasing the likelihood of political stalemates in the future? http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/21/politics/immigration-not-dead/
Obama has lost most of his political capital already so enacting immigration reform (a very controversial issue) would be the final nail in the coffin for him. I think he knows this, which makes me doubt that he’ll follow through.
Obama has already exercised a tremendous amount of executive prerogative when it comes to immigration, though. He is talking about reassessing his own policy of mass deportations.
This may be only tangentially related, but the fact that the administration is looking to more effectively prioritize deportations is definitely important, as are detentions. I recently read a statistic that less than fifteen percent of immigration detentions are of people who pose a threat to public safety, at least according to whatever measure the study was using. It seems like the ICE is overdue for reform in several ways.
Marielle,
It is, in fact, a very conservative measure. It’s amazing how many people are detained and deported after being stopped for broken brake lights, etc.
We talked about something like this in class when we read over the case of the Dominican man who was going to be deported for something minor. I was actually really shocked to learn that people are deported for things that a citizen would not even be fined for.