Archive for the ‘Immigration’ Tag
It isn’t a case of the Democrats now going off soul searching, it case of total revamp from top to bottom after Trump’s win last Tuesday. The Amazing Democrats’ advice very early on to the Clinton Campaign (and some of those comments were posted on our social media platforms as far back as the late summer of 2015) went unheard unlike when we worked for the Obama/Biden campaign in 2012. It is time DNC to fire all your overpaid pollsters (who got it so wrong), consultants and the like. The DNC should of known in their hearts of hearts that after Bernie Sanders won twenty-two states with so little money against Hillary Clinton, their candidate of choice would be in serious trouble if the Republicans got a candidate who could storm the mainstream and social media which Trump did and of course got a bit of luck along the way with that first letter released by the FBI Director that certainly damaged Hillary in early voting and gave a huge boast for Trump with his base. Yes, a lot of questions will be asked as to how the FBI were allowed to influence an election so openly. But this was far from the only reason Hillary lost even if the DNC die hards believe it to be so. The DNC and Democrats have lost their way and have been now for a long time. Their obsession only seems to be with fundraising not the core principles of what the party was founded on, Trump was able to tap into that huge hole in the DNC. It was a party that once cared for the low income, the homeless, our veterans, the poor people of America and not the massive billions of dollars in fundraising which was totally wasted trying to take Trump down. Just think today how many homeless people that billion of dollars plus would do to help house the homeless crisis in our major cities which should have been a top issue for Hillary.
Hillary campaign interviewed myself and members of The Amazing Democrats, for the record we call ourselves The Amazing Democrats as we not die hard Democrats, we wouldn’t have followed Hillary in to the fires of hell if she was wrong and we wouldn’t be silent either even if it meant we were fired from the campaign, that’s the way worked in the Obama/Biden 2012 reelection campaign and we were amazed how we survived not to be fired (nearly maybe once or twice when we really overstepped our mark and criticized some of the President’s polices publicly). The interviewing process went back as far as January 2016 to join her campaign. We were subjected to rounds and rounds of interviews, back ground checks, etc. Months would go by and we heard nothing and then it would start all over again. It was by late August this Editor got interviewed for the sixth time, more back ground checks and then was offered four important positions in four different swing states and one of this offers came directly from the DNC. All this was paid employment and not volunteer work. That last weekend in August for me was were I suffered so much turmoil as I had to give them a decision by the following Monday. It meant dropping everything in my life and getting on a plane to Pennsylvania. What was most troubling in my mind was I could sense there was panic setting in for the Democrats and Hillary’s campaign. I didn’t sleep that weekend. I went back to the old formula that the Obama campaign thought me and even though I didn’t have access to data like we did when worked for Obama, never the less, I ran the data all weekend long. It is a long and laborious process that you can see today that both the pollsters and media don’t do, why? Maybe they just are too lazy to do it, who knows? You have to run every state’s county’s data county by county, you have then figure in the data available from both the candidates’ primary wins or loses, a lot of mathematics but in the end you get a somewhat overview, be it very rough. Also you have to take into account that I had been tracking the swing states every week since both primaries ended last year. Not good for Hillary and her team I could see, in fact the Wednesday before the election I was gloomy, I could predict Trump was going to win Ohio by three percent (he won by five percent so I was only out by two percent) and as you know, no Presidential candidate can take their place in The White House if they don’t win Ohio. With all this, it was the hardiest email I ever sent, declining the positions to work on the Hillary Clinton campaign.
As we move into the Trump Presidency, it’s going to be a very dark lonely path for the Democrats. Yes, there is the mid-terms in 2018, but if the DNC works as it has for the last twenty years, they are a very slow climb back up on Capitol Hill as remember this Presidential election in 2016 had the lowest turn out of voters in years, which helped Trump but destroyed Hillary’s chances of winning, nearly 50% of the electorate didn’t bother to vote and historically mid-term voting has a very low voter turn-out. Also if Trump makes any small success of his first term and as everything Trump touches turns to gold, whether you like his manner and process or not and as it very hard to unseat a sitting President, as we all know, Trump going for a second term, then the DNC and Democrats could be looking at the wildness for next eight years at least, that’s 2024, a very depressing thought I know, but maybe a fact unless the DNC make radically chances and that starts today, not six months before the 2018 mid-terms.
In the 2006 mid-terms under George W. Bush, the Republicans got wiped out in the House and the Senate. All the media said at that time that Republican Party need to reinvent itself and stop been the “party of no”. Did they? Of course not, in fact under Obama as President and because of their hatred of him, they became the “party of no, no, no” on every bill he sent to the House and Senate. Now look where they are ten years later. The power of Washington again with the Democrats hanging onto their coattails and the sad thing is, Trump gets to pick the next Supreme Court justice. If he gets two terms, who knows, with three more justices ready for retirement in the next few years, he might even hit the golden jackpot of nominating four Supreme Court justices, a very scary thought. The Democrats however can’t do as the Republicans did in 2006, which was nothing to change their image and beliefs but the Democrats aren’t so lucky. If the DNC go back to business as usual, it will be a very dark long road for the Democrats back to the shining lights of The White House. It is simply the base. The Republican base and the Democrat base is so so much different and as Trump said decades ago when he was a registered Democrat, pro-choice and donated a lot of money to Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaigns: “If I was to run as President, I would run as a Republican as their voters as so dumb and easy to fool, I would lie and lie to them until I got numbers”. That’s all he had to do for this Presidential campaign and he is the winner today not Hillary Clinton.
Which brings what fundamentally went south very early on in the Hillary Clinton campaign:
1. NEVER EVER underestimate your opponent.
2. If he/she gets down in the dirt, you go down there with them. Hillary taking the high road was her downfall as political correctness (PC) means nothing anymore in the world of social media as we saw with Trump, the King of Twitter and Obama/Biden in 2008 as the King of Facebook. PC has gone way too far in the US and the rest of the world and Trump, no matter what you think, turned PC on it’s head in this presidential election and as he said on 60 Minutes last night, “it was nasty, very nasty but I am the one sitting here today talking to you and not them”. In fact 2020 and 2024 will be so so much nastier. Rumors were that Trump using his own money, paid pockets of supporters all over America to flood the internet with lies about Hillary and Bill Clinton and the secret? They could never be traced back to him or his campaign. Why didn’t the Hillary Clinton campaign do the same with the rumors about Trump’s ties to the Mafia? Why was this never floated all over the internet? PC I guess but he won and Clinton lost. The new trend now with Presidential campaigns as Trump has lowered the bar, is to win 2020 or 2024 the candidates from both parties to win, will have to get down in the mud and get dirty. Sad? Of course but no cares about the loser, they only care about the winner.
3. Dump the negative ads. One billion dollars was such a waste of money by the Clinton campaign and Trump barely spent a faction of that. We kept telling the Obama/Biden campaign and the DNC in 2012, negative ads don’t work anymore and only turn all the voters off. Pity they didn’t listen.
The Amazing Democrats are not all about criticizing without offering the DNC suggestions for the road forward:
1. Fire all your overpaid pollsters, consultants, lobbyists, etc..
2. Allow the progressive members of the party to take over. (I do not mean the loony left), members who understand the issues of the day to day worries of the lower income Americans (who sadly are too many), the homeless crisis in our cities all over America, our veterans living on our streets.
3. Get back to what a community organizer really is. I used get so annoy with new volunteers who joined our team who tried to tell the person forcefully on the other side of the phone why they should vote for Obama or donate to Obama’s campaign and the DNC. A community organizer’s job is to listen and listen well and then send what they hear up the line and hope they are listening otherwise you get a result like Tuesday’s Presidential elections.
4. As the advice to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, get off the negative ads obsession (turns all voters off).
5. And please with every email you sent, stop looking for donations all the time. It makes us feel you don’t care about anything but money and donations which we know to be true.
6. Find the soul of the Democrat Party again of FDR and John F. Kennedy.
7. And finally, listen. Never stop listening to those on the ground as we are the ones who can make the difference from the Democrats winning or losing an election.
Here is to the 2018 mid-terms, see you then and to 2020 Presidential election. Keep the faith and a sense of humor as The Amazing Democrats do and God Bless America,
Editor, The Amazing Democrats.
Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing
“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard.
It’s not as though Trump didn’t lay out a vision. In fact, he often laid out more than one. On the same issues.
Trump criticized U.S. allies for taking advantage of American security assistance — and criticized President Obama because, he said, U.S. allies no longer felt they could rely on American security assistance. He said his foreign policy would replace “randomness with purpose, ideology with strategy, and chaos with peace” — and that the United States would “have to be unpredictable…starting now.”
But he detailed no plans likely to spark opposition…mostly because he didn’t really offer any details at all; a “senior campaign official — who requested anonymity to keep the spotlight centered on Trump, said [the] positions were ‘politics, not policy,’ and that the goal of the speech was ‘to give his vision, in his words.'” – The Washington Post – April 28th, 2016.
Follow us on twitter: @DemocratAmazing
“No matter what side you’re on or not on, your opinion and vote does really matter”. – Be involved and be heard.
by Janell Ross
Illegal immigration is one of those topics on which almost everyone has an opinion — maybe several opinions. But when it comes to the facts, the number of people with a grasp on them is a lot smaller.
Donald Trump, a contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, said last month that illegal immigrants coming across the U.S.-Mexico border are in large part “rapist and “murderers.” And in San Francisco, the shooting dead of Kathryn Steinle, 31, allegedly caused by man who has been deported multiple times and convicted of a series of very serious crimes, has set off a new wave of concern about immigration and so-called “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco.
It’s a lot. That’s why there is Part II. But we’ve tried to boil it down to the essentials for your next immigration-related debate.
If a person is in the United States illegally, why isn’t he or she arrested and shipped back to his or her home country immediately?
This is one of those places where the country’s commitment to freedom and liberty get a real road test.
As mentioned above, immigration is often complicated. At least some portion of the people who do enter the country illegally or overstay the terms of their visitor or student visas also have legitimate asylum claims. Asylum is limited to individuals who can provide evidence that they have faced persecution or might be killed if they return to their home country. And U.S. law says that most people caught inside the United States should be given a chance to make those claims in an immigration court. (For more information on asylum seekers.
Now, layer on top of that more than 445,000 people awaiting immigration hearings. Most of these people cannot make a successful asylum claim but might have some other legal defense such as proof of a U.S. citizen parent or grandparent.
Unauthorized immigrants caught inside the United States — or in some cases at the border — generally get a hearing in one of the nation’s deeply backlogged immigration courts. Wait times now stretch into 2019.
That means that federal immigration authorities also have to make decisions about whom to hold during that wait and whom to release and trust to show up again.
How many people does the United States deport each year?
The data reporting here lags a bit behind and, of course, varies from year to year. But on average, between 2011 and 2013, immigration courts ordered about 414,650 people out in one way or another. Here’s the picture painted in the Department of Homeland Security’s most recent annual immigration data report, for 2013.
What is a “sanctuary city,” anyway?
The policies and practices differ in the estimated 60 sanctuary cities around the country. That list includes major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston. But generally, when someone has been, for instance, arrested for driving without a license and then identified as an illegal immigrant at a jail in a sanctuary city, they must serve jail time for state charges or pay related fines. Then, they are let go.
Most of these cities have identified some set of guidelines or conditions under which federal immigration officials must be alerted before the person’s release. Usually they are connected to what’s on the person’s rap sheet.
But some either don’t have them or don’t follow them. For a deeper look at the role that San Francisco’s sanctuary-city status has played in the immigration debate since the Steinle shooting.
Once an undocumented immigrant has been arrested for committing a crime inside the United States, why do sanctuary cities let them go?
During the apex of the country’s illegal immigration challenges, before the recession, law enforcement officials in some communities expressed concern about the practice of releasing these inmates after they had served time for state offenses. Some of those communities entered agreements to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement. This went on between 2004 and 2012.
These agreements allowed local jails to house undocumented immigrants after they had served time on state charges and bill the federal government for this service. Sometimes inmates were passed along to jails in other places without any formal notice to family members, then into the immigration court system for an expedited removal hearing. In many cases, people were returned to their home countries in weeks.
That program was widely criticized as a possible revenue stream for some local jails and a potential violation of international human rights accords. Some people were unable to communicate with embassy officials from their countries of origin or notify family members of their arrests, basically disappearing without explanation. Civil liberties groups called it a vehicle for racial and ethnic profiling.
One Tennessee sheriff described it as part of his toolkit to “stack these violators like cordwood” In addition, more than one analysis of who was deported and what happened during that process showed that most were people initially arrested for minor traffic violations and who had no criminal record.
President Obama touted the fact that his administration had deported the largest number of people in U.S. history. Meanwhile, immigrant advocates said all of this deeply damaged already-limited police trust in immigrant communities, making people afraid to call police or provide information. That, these advocates argued, was the real threat to public safety.
This is where sanctuary cities come in.
What happens in other cities?
After a series of changes, new programs and memos from the top that were supposed to assure that more of the nation’s deportation apparatus got aimed at serious and violent criminals, the Department of Homeland Security is now asking communities to participate in a different program, this time called Priority Enforcement.
Priority Enforcement won’t formally begin until later this summer, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. When it does, it will ask local law enforcement agencies to notify federal immigration authorities before the scheduled release of an immigrant targeted for deportation. Those targeted for deportation include people with violent and serious crime convictions. And federal officials told The Post that they did make just such a request to the folks in San Francisco.
Finally, is there any evidence that those who enter the country illegally commit more crime than others?
The Fix looked at this issue this week and found an answer that shouldn’t really be surprising.
Like every population, there are some people who have immigrated to the United States illegally who go on to commit serious and misdemeanor crimes in this country. But immigrants of all kinds are actually less likely to commit crimes than those born inside the United States.
It’s important to note that more than one-quarter of all immigrants currently in the United States are undocumented. So a spike in their crime rate would likely mean the “first generation” line wouldn’t be so low.
- We hope that helps.
by Stephen Battaglio (LA Times)
NBC Universal delivered a message to Donald Trump over his recent remarks regarding immigrants: You’re fired.
The company announced Monday that it was severing ties with the outspoken real estate mogul and reality star who is pursuing the 2016 Republican nomination for president. He will no longer be a part of the NBC series “Celebrity Apprentice,” and his two beauty pageants, Miss USA and Miss Universe, will no longer air on the network.
It was more bad news for “The Donald” since coming under fire for his June 16 presidential campaign announcement in which he made derogatory comments about Mexican immigrants while criticizing U.S. government efforts to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, which also broadcasted the pageants, severed ties with Trump last week.
“At NBC, respect and dignity for all people are cornerstones of our values,” the company said in a statement. “Due to the recent derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants, NBCUniversal is ending its business relationship with Mr. Trump.”
NBCUniversal and Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, operated the pageants in a joint venture, which started in 2002. NBCUniversal said it would continue to work with Mark Burnett’s United Artists Media Group, which produces “Celebrity Apprentice.” The series, which featured Trump and his two children, will probably air with another high-profile entrepreneur as the star, according to an NBCUniversal executive unauthorized to discuss the matter publicly.
The firestorm began when Trump described the U.S. as “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems” adding: “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Univision was the first to take action, announcing it would not air the Miss Universe pageant scheduled for July 12 even though it had already paid a $2.5-million license fee for the event. The network had recently signed a five-year deal to carry the pageant. Trump has said he would sue Univision for breach of contract.
NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt was ready to pull the plug on the network’s relationship with Trump immediately after his comments, according to people inside the network familiar with the discussions. They said the company is still looking at how to legally extricate itself from its business relationship with Trump, but informed him of its intentions Monday morning.
Trump could retain full ownership of the pageants and sell the broadcast rights to another TV outlet. He did not mention legal action when the NBC announcement was brought up during his appearance at a City Club luncheon in Chicago, and suggested he understood the company’s decision.
“As long as I was running for president, they were not happy with it,” Trump said. “They wanted me to do ‘The Apprentice.’ And now with my statements on immigration, which happen to be correct, they are going to take a different stance so that’s OK…. I think as far as ending the relationship, I have to do that, because my view on immigration is much different than the people at NBC.”
However, Trump took a tougher stance in a statement issued by Trump Organization, which said “violating closure of Miss Universe/Miss USA will be determined in court.”
He added a shot at disgraced NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who was recently demoted from his job at “NBC Nightly News.” The network “will stand behind lying Brian Williams but won’t stand behind people that tell it like it is, as unpleasant as that may be,” the statement read.
Although Trump has a strong showing in early polls among the crowded field of Republican presidential candidates, his campaign appears to be having a negative effect on his business.
One former NBC executive estimated Trump is earning roughly $2 million an episode for his services on “Celebrity Apprentice.” But the promotional exposure from a regular TV show and the pageants provided even greater value and recognition for the Trump brand name.
If NBC had kept Trump as the star of “Celebrity Apprentice” and his pageants on the air, the network probably would have faced a consumer boycott led by Latino groups angry over his remarks. Such an outcome would have made it difficult for NBC to sell commercials on the programs and ultimately turn them into money losers.
NBC’s move was applauded by Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza.
“NBC deserves an enormous amount of credit for reaffirming what their company stands for and, as importantly, what it does not stand for,” she said in a statement.
Murguia said Trump has a right to express his opinions “however reprehensible and just plain false they may be … but no one is immune from others exercising their own 1st Amendment rights to criticize or object to those opinions. And no one has a ‘right’ to a television show.”
By GINGER THOMPSON and SARAH COHENAPRIL (New York Times)
With the Obama administration deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace, the president has said the government is going after “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.”
But a New York Times analysis of internal government records shows that since President Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Twenty percent — or about 394,000 — of the cases involved people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses, the records show.
Deportations have become one of the most contentious domestic issues of the Obama presidency, and an examination of the administration’s record shows how the disconnect evolved between the president’s stated goal of blunting what he called the harsh edge of immigration enforcement and the reality that has played out.
Illegal immigrants on a bus in Broadview, Ill., last year, to be deported. Deportations have become one of the most contentious issues of the Obama years. Credit Leslye Davis/The New York Times
Mr. Obama came to office promising comprehensive immigration reform, but lacking sufficient support, the administration took steps it portrayed as narrowing the focus of enforcement efforts on serious criminals. Yet the records show that the enforcement net actually grew, picking up more and more immigrants with minor or no criminal records.
Interviews with current and former administration officials, as well as immigrant advocates, portray a president trying to keep his supporters in line even as he sought to show political opponents that he would be tough on people who had broken the law by entering the country illegally. As immigrant groups grew increasingly frustrated, the president held a succession of tense private meetings at the White House where he warned advocates that their public protests were weakening his hand, making it harder for him to cut a deal. At the same, his opponents in Congress insisted his enforcement efforts had not gone far enough.
Five years into his presidency, neither side is satisfied.
“It would have been better for the administration to state its enforcement intentions clearly and stand by them, rather than being willing to lean whichever way seemed politically expedient at any given moment,” said David Martin, the deputy general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security until December 2010. “They lost credibility on enforcement, despite all the deportations, while letting activists think they could always get another concession if they just blamed Obama. It was a pipe dream to think they could make everyone happy.”
Various studies of court records and anecdotal reports over the past few years have raised questions about who is being deported by immigration officials. The Times analysis is based on government data covering more than 3.2 million deportations over 10 years, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and provides a more detailed portrait of the deportations carried out under Mr. Obama.
The demographics of those being removed today are not all that different from those removed over the years. Most are Mexican men under the age of 35. But many of their circumstances have changed.
The records show the largest increases were in deportations involving illegal immigrants whose most serious offense was listed as a traffic violation, including driving under the influence. Those cases more than quadrupled from 43,000 during the last five years of President George W. Bush’s administration to 193,000 during the five years Mr. Obama has been in office. In that same period, removals related to convictions for entering or re-entering the country illegally tripled under Mr. Obama to more than 188,000.
The data also reflect the Obama administration’s decision to charge immigration violators who previously would have been removed without formal charges. In the final year of the Bush administration, more than a quarter of those caught in the United States with no criminal record were returned to their native countries without charges. In 2013, charges were filed in more than 90 percent of those types of cases, which prohibit immigrants from returning for at least five years and exposing those caught returning illegally to prison time.
Ivan Maldonado, 18, on stairs, dropped out of high school to work in a factory after his father was deported. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
“For years, the Obama administration’s spin has been that they are simply deporting so-called ‘criminal aliens,’ but the numbers speak for themselves,” said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center. “In truth, this administration — more than any other — has devastated immigrant communities across the country, tearing families away from loved ones, simply because they drove without a license, or re-entered the country desperately trying to be reunited with their family members.”
Administration officials say the deportations are a result of a decade in which Congress has passed tougher immigration laws, increased funding for enforcement and stymied efforts to lay out a path to legal residency for the bulk of nation’s 11.5 million illegal immigrants. “The president is concerned about the human cost of separating families,” said Cecilia Muñoz, the White House domestic policy adviser. “But it’s also true that you can’t just flip a switch and make it stop.”
In the spring of 2012, Mr. Obama announced a way for illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children — so called “Dreamers” — to avoid deportation. Facing a new wave of protests, he announced two weeks ago a review of the administration’s deportation programs in an effort to make them “more humane.”
Republicans immediately pushed back, warning that the changes he had already made had weakened enforcement. Despite the record deportations, they said his shift in emphasis to the border had resulted in a decline in the removals from the interior of the country — a trend borne out by the records. And while immigrant advocates and some leading Democrats are outraged by the administration’s policy of penalizing illegal entry at the border, many Republicans have accused the administration of using those cases to inflate its deportation numbers.
“The administration has carried out a dramatic nullification of federal law,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. “Under the guise of setting ‘priorities’, the administration has determined that almost anyone in the world who can enter the United States is free to illegally live, work and claim benefits here as long as they are not caught committing a felony or other serious crime.”
The information on 3.2 million cases, obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, log every removal handled by the agency but do not provide enough information to determine which cases represent repeated deportations of the same person.
In places like Painesville, Ohio, a small town on the shore of Lake Erie sustained for decades by immigrants who work in greenhouses and factories, the spate of deportations has been felt one person at a time.
Anabel Barron, who has lived in the United States for nearly two decades, was facing deportation after being stopped for speeding and driving without a license. Her record showed that she had been removed previously and she said she returned to be with her four American-born children. At a regular Tuesday night meeting of immigrants at a converted church, she was fretting about her coming hearing.
Esubio Moctezuma, right, was deported, but returned after winning a court fight. Credit Brendan Bannon for The New York Times
“I am afraid of being deported,” she said. “But for my children it’s worse. They don’t sleep the same. They don’t eat. They don’t want to go to school because they are afraid I am not going to be there when they get home.”
Deportations began rising sharply in the final years of the Bush administration. Having failed to win comprehensive reform in part because opponents argued that sufficient progress had not been made in securing the borders, that administration undertook a sweeping immigration crackdown. It stepped up military-style raids on factories and farms and granted local police the authority to check the immigration status of foreigners they suspected of being in the country illegally. Deportations reached 383,000 in 2008.
Congress supported the moves, doubling the immigration agency’s budget to $5.5 billion in 2008, and imposed a mandate that required the immigration agency to detain a daily average of 34,000 immigrants.
Mr. Obama attacked those policies during his 2008 campaign, saying, “When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that’s happening, the system just isn’t working.” He criticized his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, for abandoning the push for immigration reform when it became “politically unpopular,” and promised to make it a priority in his first year in office.
But that promise collided with the reality of the recession and the bruising fight to get a financial stimulus package through Congress. “We did stimulus, and then, as we calculated the rest of the agenda, we saw health care as possible, energy as sort of possible, but super hard, and immigration as impossible,” said a former senior White House official. “The votes just weren’t there.”
Like Mr. Bush, both Mr. Obama and his first Department of Homeland Security secretary, the former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, believed that to win comprehensive reform, they needed to demonstrate a commitment to enforcing existing laws. The Obama administration set out to keep deportation numbers up, but to make enforcement “smarter.”
Immigration officials set a goal of 400,000 deportations a year — a number that was scrawled on a whiteboard at their Washington headquarters. The agency deployed more agents to the border, according to several former immigration officials, where finding and removing illegal immigrants is legally and politically easier. The administration attempted to tread more carefully in the interior of the country, where illegal immigrants have typically been settled longer. It ended the worksite raids and rolled back the local police’s broad discretion to check foreigners’ immigration status. Instead, it expanded a pilot project started under Mr. Bush that required the state and local police to check everyone fingerprinted during an arrest.
Deportations rose sharply in the final years of the Bush administration, and have remained high under President Obama.
More people are being removed from the border. Meanwhile a growing portion of those caught illegally crossing the border have lived in the country for years.
Mr. Obama said he would focus on removing people who had committed serious crimes, but the percentage of deportees with either minor infractions or no criminal offenses at all remains high, especially at the border.
The Obama administration has expanded the use of removal proceedings that expedite deportations without providing an opportunity for appeal.
Source: New York Times analysis of more than 3.2 million individual actions taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Excludes deportations that are handled exclusively by Border Patrol.
The change was made partly to address charges of racial profiling, but the new program — called Secure Communities — greatly expanded the pool of people who were checked, ICE officials said. And those found living in the United States illegally could be turned over to the immigration authorities regardless of the charges against them.
A June 2010 memo from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement director at the time, John Morton, for the first time set priorities for enforcement. They included any immigrants who had entered the country illegally, overstayed visas or had ignored prior deportation orders, regardless of their criminal history or how long they had lived in the United States. Although the memo was meant to focus enforcement, the categories were so broad, former officials of the immigration agency said, that they easily covered a third of the country’s 11.5 million illegal immigrants.
The administration also broadened the use of expedited proceedings, which gave illegal immigrants limited opportunities to consult a lawyer, seek asylum or present extenuating circumstances to judges. The number of expedited removals nearly doubled from the Bush to the Obama administrations. The Obama administration also expanded the pursuit of people who had failed to comply with previous deportation orders. And a majority of them involved immigrants who either had no criminal history, or had been convicted for immigration or traffic offenses.“Even as we recognize that enforcing the law is necessary,” Mr. Obama said in a 2011 speech in El Paso, “we don’t relish the pain that it causes in the lives of people who are just trying to get by and get caught up in the system.”
Painesville, Ohio, 30 miles east of Cleveland, offers a snapshot of some people caught up in the system. Every Tuesday night at a nondenominational church downtown, several dozen immigrant families cram together to talk about ways they can help loved ones who are either facing deportation or who have already been removed. The stories spill out so fast, and they all seem to share the same general narrative arc — immigrant drives through red or yellow light, police officer asks for driver’s license, immigrant lands in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, children reel from uncertainty.
“It’s been hard without my husband here,” said Elizabeth Perez, a 35-year-old American-born woman and a former Marine who briefly served in Afghanistan. Her husband was deported to Mexico in June 2010 after the police detained him during a traffic stop and the authorities found 14-year-old misdemeanor charges for assault and marijuana possession.
As she spoke, her 3-year-old son was fidgeting wildly in her arms and tugging on her long hair. Her 4-year-old daughter had plopped onto the floor and began screaming for her mother’s attention. “We were supposed to do this together,” she said, trying to quiet her restless brood. “Raise the kids, I mean.”
Esperanza Pacheco, who said she has lived illegally in the United States for 20 years, was detained with her husband three years ago for illegally re-entering the country. He was deported, but he was allowed to return after winning a court fight last year. And her deportation has been temporarily suspended. Still, she said, the ordeal hangs over her four daughters. The eldest of the girls, 16-year-old Esmeralda Moctezuma, piped up, “School is hard because we feel like people are pointing at us.”
An informal tally among the immigrants gathered that recent Tuesday night found a total of 22 people who either had a spouse who had been deported or were in deportation proceedings themselves. All told, those parents had 59 children. All but nine of the children were born in this country.
Five of them had fathers who were deported, and two of the men had died of exposure in the Arizona desert trying to make it back to their families.
The last word David Lomeli’s three children had of their father was the note from forensics officials who found his remains in July 2012. It read, “Subject was lying on his stomach with his head facing north. He was lying on a ripped-open black trash bag. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition with the skull fully exposed. He was wearing blue jeans (no shoes, socks or shirt). Subject appears to have been at this location for approximately one month.”
Half a dozen of the children had dropped out of school to help fill the void left by their fathers’ deportations. “It’s like a light that was inside of them has gone out,” said Manuela Martinez, referring to her six sons.
In April 2010, an 11-year-old girl named Arlette Rocha, with long brown hair and a cherub’s cheeks, was found hanging from the stairway at home in an apparent suicide some eight months after her father was deported to Mexico. Her mother had taken a job on the second shift at a local plastics molding factory, forcing Arlette to take care of three younger siblings.
When the family petitioned to have the father’s deportation reversed, Dr. Archie S. Wilkinson, who had tried to resuscitate Arlette, wrote a letter to authorities, pleading with them to return him for the sake of her surviving siblings.
Dr. Wilkinson wrote that in his view, Arlette had been suffering “from the profound grief of missing her dad, and the extra burden placed on her when their family’s main support was taken away.” He ended, writing, “Please give this family a chance.”
One teenager’s plea reached all the way to the White House. Ivan Maldonado, 18, who lives in what has become a typical mixed-status immigrant household, was 3 years old when his parents illegally moved him and an older brother to the United States from Mexico. His parents had four more sons in Ohio. Then in 2010, their father was deported after the authorities found he had failed to obey a previous order.
Janet Murguia, the president of the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization, introducing President Obama in 2011. She now attacks him as the “deporter in chief.” Credit Pablo Martinez Monsivai/Associated Press
His mother has been allowed to stay to take care of the children, and Mr. Maldonado and his older brother have been granted temporary legal status.
In 2011, Mr. Maldonado, who recently dropped out of high school to work at the same factory that once employed his father, went on a trip to Washington organized by advocates where he shared his story with Ms. Muñoz, Mr. Obama’s lead adviser on immigration. “She told me she would never forget me,” he recalled. “It made me feel that maybe there was hope my dad might come home.”
The issue of deportations has reached the White House repeatedly, turning immigration into a contentious issue between Mr. Obama and the Hispanic and Asian communities that are a critical part of his political base.
“We assumed that a Democratic president who wanted to move immigration reform would not pursue a strategy of deporting the people who he was intent on legalizing,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change. “That was a totally wrong assumption. And there is a lot of anger about that.”
One of the first confrontations played out in March 2010, when immigrant organizations announced plans to hold a march in Washington to demand that Congress pass immigration reform and that Mr. Obama stop the expansion of Secure Communities. Three former administration officials said the White House quickly began an effort aimed at damage control, summoning leading immigrant advocates to meet with the president.
Having just emerged from a bruising fight for health care reform, the president saw the sudden pressure from immigration groups as a betrayal, the former aides said. But, at the White House meeting, the advocates also expressed betrayal.
“They were like: ‘This deportation thing is important. Families are being ripped apart,’ ” recalled a former senior White House official, who requested anonymity to recount the meeting. “They’re almost crying. Their faces are turning red. Every one of them had a story.”
Chung-Wha Hong, the former executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, recalled that the president “kept saying that he was not above the law, and that if we were suggesting that he stop enforcing the law then there was no point in continuing the conversation.” She added: “We weren’t asking him not to enforce the law. Our point was simply that there were things he could do to protect good people from bad laws.”
At some point, the former White House official recalled, the president made clear he had heard enough.
“Finally the president was like, ‘Hey, you know what? You don’t have to convince me. I’m dealing with a Congress that won’t move on this, and the politics they’re looking at won’t force them to move,’ ” the former official said, recalling Mr. Obama’s words, and adding, “So the thing we should spend our time talking about is what can you do and what can I do to change the political calculus.” The former official said that the meeting ended with Mr. Obama and the advocates both angry, and the immigration march in Washington went ahead as planned.
Last month, facing renewed pressure, Mr. Obama announced that he had ordered his new secretary of homeland security, Jeh Johnson, to review deportation programs. “When you hear enough stories about separating families or removing people who are not truly dangerous,” Mr. Johnson said, “it leads you to want to dig in to make sure you’re getting the policy and the implementation right.”
Janet Murguia, the president of the National Council of La Raza, the country’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization, joined a growing chorus of unions, religious groups and immigrant advocacy organizations that have labeled Mr. Obama the nation’s “deporter in chief,” and demanded that he make good on his promises to protect immigrant families from unfair removal policies. The pressure has prompted similar calls from leading congressional Democrats, including some of Mr. Obama’s closest allies, who are worried about, among other things, the impact deportations may have on Hispanic turnout in this year’s midterm elections.
After ordering the review, Mr. Obama called the advocates together again. While the White House hoped to intensify pressure on Republicans for comprehensive reform, the advocates had all but given up hope, and have instead directed much of their attention — and outrage — at the administration.
Mr. Obama asked them to skip the stories of pain and suffering, not because he did not care, but because he felt it more productive to discuss strategy for winning permanent relief, people who attended the meeting said.
The odds were not good, Mr. Obama acknowledged. But he asked the advocates to stick with him another 90 days, and press hard on Congress. If those efforts failed to lead to reform, Mr. Obama said he would work with them on administrative relief. The advocates and others told the president that their communities had waited long enough.
“When the president told us he was going to only go after criminal aliens, we all said, ‘OK, go do that, but don’t go after people whose only crime is that they’re living here undocumented,’ ” said Richard Trumka, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who attended the meeting. “But that’s not what happened. Now immigrant communities are feeling under attack. And it’s hard for them to focus on trying to win reform, when they’re afraid they could be pulled over for running a red light, and get torn away from their families.”
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