The Deportation President

Dear Friends,

President Obama has now deported 2,000,000 people. That is more than all of the Presidents from 1892 to 1997 combined.  He claims that he has no choice because of Congress.  I wonder if the President who claims he can spy on all Americans and can order Americans killed without any judicial or congressional authority or due process sees the irony in his position that he does not have the authority to use prosecutorial discretion, pardons and reprieves to stop breaking up families and deporting people who are in all ways, but the eyes of the draconian immigration laws, Americans.  Article II, Section 2 of the United States Constitution in discussing Presidential powers reads in part, "he shall have the power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment."

You should take the time to read a couple of articles on this subject.  There is a blog by Julian Gomez at The Huffington Post entitled "Can President Obama Stop Deportations" here, and an article by Sally Kohn at The Daily Beast entitled "Obama Could Legally Stop Immigrant Deportations" here.

President Obama wants us to think that it is only the "bad" guys that are being deported.  The President and Administration personnel use terms like criminals and threats to safety to describe the people being deported.  Certainly there are some people who have been deported that are really criminals and are threats to the public safety, but there are many within the 1,100 people deported each day that, except for their undocumented status are honest, hardworking members of our society with jobs, families and friends just like those of us born here.  Any undocumented person that comes into contact with our criminal justice system simply by being arrested (not necessarily charged or convicted of a crime) can be and often is quickly put on an ICE hold (kept in jail) and then deported.

While President Obama would like us to believe that stories like those recently reported by Julia Preston in The New York Times (here) do not happen, they do and with great regularity.

Karen Sandoval’s promising life in this city fell apart in one day last summer when she went to buy school supplies for her two daughters.
Ms. Sandoval, a Honduran immigrant here illegally, was riding with the man her girls have always called their father. Immigration agents, seeing a dilapidated car, pulled them over. They released Ms. Sandoval but detained her partner, a Nicaraguan also here illegally, and he was soon deported.
Now Ms. Sandoval, 28, is grieving her loss and scrambling to support her children without her partner, Enrique Morales, and the income from his thriving flooring business. She sees no future for the girls, who are both American citizens, in her home country or his. So Ms. Sandoval is facing the possibility that she may never see Mr. Morales again.

Many immigrants here have been stunned by the arrests, in which some people seemed to be stopped based solely on their Latino appearance, because they had been living here uneventfully since they came in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to work on reconstruction.
One of those workers, Jimmy Barraza, was unloading a carful of groceries on Aug. 16 when agents pulled up with pistols drawn, handcuffing him as well as his teenage son, a United States citizen. A mobile fingerprint check of Mr. Barraza, who is also Honduran, revealed an old court order for his deportation.
Mr. Barraza, 28, won release from detention but is still fighting to remain. His wife is a longtime legal immigrant, and he has two other younger children who are American citizens.
“If they deport me,” he said, “who will keep my son in line? Who will support my family?”

President Obama has the power to stop this insanity but he must do two things.  First, he needs to stop worrying that the Republicans will get mad at him for not deporting every single undocumented person.  Second, he needs to take control of the immigration bureaucracy.  He has the power to enforce the terrible immigration laws in a humane way, but he needs to choose to do that.  So far he has chosen to be the Deportation President.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal