Today, after months of political wagering from both Republicans and Democrats, the Senate unanimously passed a $600 million dollar bill marked for border security which is now headed to President Obama’s desk for signature. While the sequence of events leading to this most recent capitulation to the enforcement-first crowd is a little dizzying, the bill’s unanimous passage was partly a product of a bluff called on the Senate floor. Although the substance of the bill could have been much worse, the mere fact that the only major immigration legislation passed thus far in the 111th Congress was another border bill shows how far we are from treating immigration as a serious issue, rather than a political game.
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In Spanish, the word cariño literally means “affectionate.” Cariño is used to describe warmth and care, but it is also often used as a pet name for your child or partner, for example, mi cariño/mi cariña. So in the Latino community where the word cariño is an important part of the vernacular, some might be surprised that Latinos have so warmly embraced a “cool and detached” President like Obama. This has been in large part due to his commitment to fixing immigration. However, the President’s recent lack of cariño towards the Latino community coupled with his inability to deliver on immigration reform has both his approval numbers dropping among Latinos and Spanish language media critics asking “Who’s in charge in Washington?” Also, his once masterful speeches are now being called nothing more than “cheap and easy rhetoric.”
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BY KAREN TUMLIN*

A year ago today, the Obama administration promised a radical overhaul of the nation’s immigration detention system in response to a wave of reports revealing widespread and egregious violations of the basic rights of detained immigrants. Changes to date have been too slow and tinker only at the edges of the problem. Worse, the pipeline to immigration detention is growing: the Obama administration has lifted deportations to historic highs. This ensures that hundreds of thousands of immigrants will face months, and sometimes years, of detention in remote parts of the country and miles from loved ones. This is not the change we had hoped for.
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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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Republican and Democratic governors alike might need a tutorial on the concept of checks and balances, given the dismay they are expressing over the federal government’s lawsuit against Arizona’s SB 1070. Democrats are purportedly worried that it will hurt their chances in tough state elections, while Republicans are calling the lawsuit hypocritical because the federal government is litigating instead of legislating immigration.

Let’s review. As the lawsuit very clearly and eloquently lays out, the Constitution empowers Congress to regulate immigration. The President and his executive branch carry out the laws (and are given the discretion regarding how to exercise them). And when the states pass laws that conflict with this scheme, the federal courts are the referee.
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Yesterday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona, challenging the state’s immigration enforcement law (SB 1070). The DOJ lawsuit—which seeks to stop the law from going into effect on July 29th—argues that Arizona’s law is unconstitutional since it claims state authority over federal immigration policy. While political opposition in Arizona to DOJ’s legal challenge has come from both parties, some of the most laughable comments have come from Arizona’s Republican Senators who have used the lawsuit as yet another opportunity to claim that the Obama administration has failed to do anything on immigration. Only Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has been willing to engage the Democrats on immigration at all this year and even still, Sen. Graham back peddled after health care reform was passed. To date, ZERO Republicans are willing to step forward and play ball on an actual immigration reform bill—which makes the political finger-pointing from those unwilling to meet the President halfway all the more infuriating.
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Today, President Obama delivered his first major immigration speech at American University urging Republicans to put bipartisan and election politics aside and help Democrats fix our broken immigration system once and for all. With an audience of law enforcement, elected officials, and evangelical, business, labor, and community leaders, the President provided a framework for understanding the depth and complexity of the immigration issue—laying out the fundamental problems with our immigration system while highlighting the critical role immigrants have and continue to play in strengthening America. The President then asked Republican leadership to join his Administration’s efforts to step up, take responsibility and pass an immigration reform bill.
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According to a White House press release, President Obama is expected to deliver remarks on “the need to fix our broken immigration system through comprehensive immigration reform” at the American University School of International Service on Thursday, July 1. Only time will tell whether it’s a call to arms, more lip service or remarks on a yet to be filed DOJ lawsuit against Arizona’s SB1070.

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Political hype and hypocrisy was on display this week in Washington as eight senators sent an oddly worded letter to President Obama demanding that he refrain from circumventing the will of Congress on immigration. The letter, signed by Senators Grassley, Vitter, Inhofe, Isakson, Chamblis, Bunning, Cochran, and Hatch, is filled with moral outrage, alleging some kind of secret conspiracy to get around Congress by granting deferred action to everyone in the United States illegally. (Deferred action is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion to refrain from removing someone from the United States).

The letter has also been linked to warnings from the restrictionist group Numbers USA, who claim that the president intends to grant “amnesty” to 12 to 18 million illegal aliens, even though by DHS’s own estimate there are no more than 10.8 million people here illegally in the U.S. These two items feed off one another, helping to perpetuate an urban legend of massive proportions—that somehow, with the stroke of a pen, the president can grant “amnesty.” How do rumors like this get started? Take a look at the language of the senators’ letter to see just how easy it is to manipulate public perception.
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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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