Last week, two separate branches of DHS released important evidence supporting the argument that our immigration laws are fundamentally broken. The Office of Immigration Statistics released its annual report on removal and return statistics, noting that removals in 2009 totaled 393,289—marking the seventh straight year of increase. Meanwhile, ICE released a memo directing legal counsel to review and terminate certain immigration court cases where the immigrant also had an application pending in front of USCIS. ICE estimates that approximately 17,000 people may benefit from this new policy. When you juxtapose the numbers, however—393,289 v. 17,000—it reminds you just how out of balance our immigration system has become.
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Conspiracy theorists hate it when no one pays attention. Witness last month’s letter to President Obama in which eight Republican Senators accused him of planning to circumvent the will of Congress through a regulatory grant of “amnesty” suggesting that plans were afoot in the Department of Homeland Security to make it happen. Despite their mock outrage, the letter barely made a ripple in the immigration debate. And just a few days after his speech on immigration, President Obama unequivocally stated that he wanted a real solution to our immigration crisis, rejecting both a free pass for all undocumented immigrants and a scorched earth, deport them all approach.
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Yesterday, Phoenix district court Judge Susan Bolton enjoined key provisions of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB1070. The judge recognized that the federal government has primary authority over making and enforcing immigration law, and that while states have limited authority in this arena, they cannot interfere with federal enforcement or undermine federal priorities. The decision acknowledges the complex nature of immigration law and the harmful consequences of local police attempting to make immigration determinations. The judge also recognized the serious strain that the Arizona law would place on federal resources, which would detract from the federal government’s ability to enforce immigration laws in other states and target resources toward serious criminals.
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Yesterday, the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border, Maritime, and Global Counterterrorism held a hearing on Enhancing DHS’ Efforts to Disrupt Alien Smuggling across Our Borders. Witnesses from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and Terry Goddard, Attorney General for the State of Arizona all testified. Unfortunately, the hearing ended up being short on solutions and long on rhetoric.
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A new report on border security issued by Center for American Progress adds yet more evidence to the argument that the U.S. government is already doing plenty about border security. Brick by Brick: A Half-Decade of Immigration Enforcement and the Need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, written by Former DHS Assistant Secretary for Border and Transportation Security Policy Stewart Verdery, details the range of programs that have been implemented in the last five years and their impact on the border. The report cautions, however, that securing the border is an elusive goal, and without comprehensive immigration reform, we will never achieve the real objectives needed to end illegal immigration.
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Yesterday, President Obama sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formally asking for $600 million in additional border security spending to fund 1,000 additional Border Patrol agents, 160 additional ICE agents, two unmanned aircraft systems, extra Border Patrol canine teams and improved infrastructure along the Southwest Border. In a tandem move today, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano announced several new DHS initiatives to bolster security along the Southwest border. Although Secretary Napolitano trumpeted DHS’s new border initiatives as well as past achievements, she also acknowledged that the border can never be hermetically sealed and that stalling immigration reform by highlighting border security issues is not the answer to our immigration problems.
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Harvard sophomore, Eric Balderas, knows why the DREAM Act is important to so many. Earlier this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) picked up Balderas in Boston on his way to visit his mother in San Antonio, Texas. Balderas now faces the possibility of deportation at a hearing next month. The 19 year old biology major was valedictorian of his high school class and is on a full scholarship at Harvard. Sadly, Balderas is just one of roughly 1.5 million unauthorized immigrant children—many of whom don’t speak Spanish and consider themselves American—currently living in the U.S. who are at risk for deportation. How many of America’s talented youth must the U.S. deport before Congress musters the courage to act?
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President Calderón’s visit to the United States yesterday continues to highlight issues of immigration, border control and crime. Presidents Calderón and Obama made the important point that we should address, not conflate, these two important issues. Judging from President Obama’s remarks yesterday, he seems to understand that the horrific violence which currently afflicts our southern neighbor is a complex problem that requires a multi-faceted solution—that the violence is not about immigration but about the flow of guns, drugs and money across the borders. President Obama reaffirmed his administration’s commitment “to stem the southbound flow of American guns and money” and to develop “new approaches to reducing the demand for drugs in our country,” pledging to keep up law-enforcement pressure on the criminal gangs that “traffic in drugs, guns, and people.”
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In a sudden about-face last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reversed its position on an interpretation of law which drastically increased immigrants’ vulnerability to deportation. In a brief filed on April 21, DHS urged the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) to modify an existing precedent decision in a pending BIA case, Matter of Alyazji. The modification, suggested by respondent’s attorney, Wayne Sachs, and amicus curiae, the American Immigration Council’s Legal Action Center, limits when an immigrant could be ordered deported for certain past crimes.
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Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) have done something that is increasingly rare in Washington—they have issued a bipartisan request for a concrete change in immigration policy. Today, Senators Durbin and Lugar asked Secretary Janet Napolitano to defer deportation of students who would qualify for the DREAM Act. As the lead sponsors of this bipartisan legislation (S. 729)—which would give legal status to students who arrived in the U.S. before the age of 15, have lived in the U.S for at least five years, and are pursuing their education or serving in the military—they have a particular interest in the fate of students who are caught right now in the clutches of deportation.
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