Pro-immigration groups plan to press President Obama hard in his last few months to shed his “deporter in chief” reputation so that his successor doesn’t feel compelled to go even further.
“I think unless President Obama changes course … both his policy and the culture it created really invite the next administration to continue and expand on some of the worst and most oppressive immigration policies we’ve seen in generations,” said Matt Nelson of Presente.org, the Latino community’s largest online advocacy group.
Obama has already deported 2.5 million illegal immigrants, more than all of his predecessors combined, earning him the derisive nickname “deporter in chief” from numerous Latino leaders and immigration reform advocates.
“The policy will be inherited by the next administration, but there is still an opportunity here for the president to change course in his last months in office,” Nelson said.
Nelson said Obama could issue new executive orders, and apply the same principles to deportation and detained immigrants that underpin his drive to revamp the country’s criminal justice system and prisons. “We are more and more speaking out against mass incarceration … and are demanding change,” he said.
This final push comes on the heels of the Supreme Court’s deadlock over Obama’s 2014 executive orders that would have shielded millions from deportation. With the effort to win comprehensive immigration reform already lost, getting Obama to direct Homeland Security to let up on deportations is immigration reform advocates’ last chance at victory.
Jesus Guzman of the Graton Day Labor Center in Northern California said Latino groups will press him until his final day in office.
“He has the power,” he recently told Consortium News, an online investigative magazine. “He can’t just say ‘it’s too bad about the Supreme Court decision’ and continue with the deportation policies.
“We are calling for him to end them,” Guzman said.
Despite the backlash from the Latino community, which came out in force for him in both his campaigns, the Obama administration is not apologizing for its deportation approach or record.
Obama “has been quite serious about making sure that we enforce the law,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday.
“What we’ve also tried to do is to enforce the law in a way that’s consistent with our values,” he said. “And that’s why we want to focus our limited law enforcement resources on deporting felons and not breaking up families.”
Groups supporting a wholesale rewrite of immigration laws and a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. said that by focusing on the latest border-crossers, those with criminal records and threats to national security for removal, Obama will ensnare relatives of immigrants already in the country.
They are particularly upset by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids last Christmas that saw agents entering people’s homes, taking away mothers and children and separating family members.
“The Obama administration is putting families and children on the same level as criminals and terrorists,” Wendy Young, a legal aid worker, told the Washington Post then.
“The question now is: Will the next president continue Obama’s policies and make things even worse for our community?” United We Dream’s Greisa Martinez asked.
Martinez said her group, which represents so-called Dreamers, young adults who were illegally brought to the country as children and would have been eligible for citizenship if Congress had passed the Dream Act, said she will mobilize Dreamers to push Obama on the subject until his last day in office.
