Ruling Rejects Obama Administration Retroactive Policy

Dear Friends,

Candidate Obama voiced empathy for immigrants and a strong desire to reform our disastrous immigration policy.  Unfortunately, President Obama seems to have lost any empathy that candidate Obama had.

A recent article in The New York Times (here) entitled "For Those Deported, Court Ruling Comes Too Late" caught my eye.  The first few paragraphs tell the story.

Vincenzo Donnoli was 9 when his family immigrated legally to Brooklyn. He attended Erasmus Hall High School, married and divorced in Flatbush, ran a landscaping business and had five children. But at 51 he is back — alone and jobless — in Pomarico, the hill town in southern Italy where his father was a shepherd, as a deportee banned for life from returning to the United States.
His offense: two misdemeanor convictions for possessing small amounts of cocaine, in 1988 and 2006, both guilty pleas resolved without jail time. Retroactively, immigration authorities added them up to equal an “aggravated felony” that required Mr. Donnoli’s automatic deportation last year.
That kind of arithmetic, an aggressive government interpretation of 1996 immigration laws that has been increasingly invoked in recent years, was rejected by the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision in June. But the ruling came too late for Mr. Donnoli and thousands of deportees like him, all former lawful residents who have no way to turn that legal vindication into a chance to come home.

Please note that it was the Obama Administration that deported Mr. Donnoli.  I am not a legal scholar, but I have to believe that President Obama has the power to right this wrong.  Even the Supreme Court thought that the policy being followed by the Obama Administration was wrong.

After reading this article, I did a little checking on President Obama's actual immigration record and was not pleased with what I found.  This article from the Huffington Post (here) is a great summary.  The fact is that President Obama has deported far more people than President George W. Bush ever did.  Here are the first few paragraphs of the article.

A little girl became the face of the nation's immigration debate on Wednesday, when she told First Lady Michelle Obama about her mother's fear.
"My mom ... she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn't have papers," the second-grader said after being called on by the first lady, who was visiting a suburban Maryland school with Mexico's First Lady Margarita Zavala.
And when Michele Obama replied by describing the need to make sure "that people can be here with the right kind of papers," the girl simply responded quietly: "But my mom doesn't have any." (Watch the video below.)
The girl's guilelessness and innocence, in contrast to the inchoate rage of the anti-immigrant movement -- and even to the first lady's suddenly hollow-sounding talking points -- could well turn her into an icon as immigration makes its way to the front of the national agenda.
But surely she was wrong, in suggesting that President Obama is a particular danger to undocumented immigrants? Perhaps she was confusing him with the governor of Arizona or something?
Well, actually, it turns out the little girl was right. Obama's Department of Homeland Security has been deporting more undocumented immigrants than President Bush's ever did.
The number of deportations each year more than tripled during the Bush era -- and has kept going up since then. During fiscal year 2009, the first fiscal year of the Obama era, 387,790 immigrants were deported -- almost 100,000 more during the last full fiscal year of the Bush presidency.

 Here is the video of the exchange between Mrs. Obama and the little girl:



It is time for President Obama to reclaim the empathy that candidate Obama showed towards immigrants in this country.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal