Obama dealt series of setbacks on immigration, takes fire from all sides
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Sunday, March 22, 2015
President Obama’s immigration policies suffered a rough week, faltering in the courts, taking fire on Capitol Hill, angering his political base and even having his own deportation chief undercut his message as he struggles to find a middle-ground path to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.
The busy week climaxed late Friday, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced it had deported an illegal immigrant Mennonite pastor, in a case that has sparked fury among immigrant rights advocates who say it exposes the hypocrisy of Mr. Obama’s own statements about pushing for a more lenient policy that keeps families together.
The deportation was announced just hours after ICE Director Sarah Saldana was forced to walk back her statement from a day earlier that she wanted Congress to pass laws requiring state and local authorities to hold and turn over illegal immigrants.
Also Thursday, the federal judge who has temporarily halted Mr. Obama’s amnesty threatened further sanctions against the president’s attorneys, questioning whether they misled him by saying they hadn’t put any of the amnesty into action — even though they had been approving the so-called Dreamers under one part of the expanded program.
“Like an idiot, I believed that,” Judge Andrew S. Hanen said at a hearing in his Brownsville, Texas, courtroom, The Associated Press reported.
Republicans are gearing up for budget battles on the House and Senate floors this week, where immigration is likely to play a role as the GOP seeks to cut down on tax benefits available to those in the country without authorization.
Mr. Obama’s nominee to be the next attorney general, Loretta Lynch, has seen her support crater among Republicans over her backing of Mr. Obama’s amnesty moves, which she told the Senate earlier this year she believed were based on sound legal reasoning.
Judge Hanen has rejected that legal reasoning and issued an injunction. Ms. Lynch would be in charge of Mr. Obama’s appeal should she win confirmation to lead the Justice Department.
Even as conservative anger at Mr. Obama is boiling over, worry on the other side of the issue from immigrant rights advocates is growing after ICE last week deported Max Villatoro, a Mennonite pastor from Iowa who has been in the country for years, has four children who are U.S. citizens and whom the activists said was a perfect candidate for the president’s new, more lenient policies.
In addition to announcing proactive legal status for 4 million illegal immigrants, Mr. Obama in November also ordered immigration agents not to bother deporting most of the rest of the illegal immigrant population and to focus only on serious criminals.
ICE officials say Mr. Villatoro’s conviction in the 1990s for drunken driving makes him a priority for deportation, and despite a week of protests and demands for meetings between the activists and Homeland Security officials, late Friday, ICE sent Mr. Villatoro home to Honduras.
Mr. Villatoro was netted during a fugitive dragnet earlier this month that caught more than 2,000 illegal immigrants — some of whom had previously been released by state and local authorities who refused to cooperate by holding them for federal ICE agents.
That’s one reason Ms. Saldana agreed with congressional Republicans on Thursday that she would like to see Congress pass a law requiring cooperation.
“Thank you. Amen,” Ms. Saldana told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Thursday.
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