Immigration Groups Want Obama to Stop Deportations. Here’s Why He Probably Won’t.

US News & World Report

By Lauren Fox

February 25, 2014

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/25/immigration-groups-want-obama-to-stop-deportations-heres-why-he-probably-wont

For nine days, Jose Valdez has sat outside the the Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters in Phoenix, hungry but resolved. Today, he sits wearing a red T-shirt that reads  “not one more deportation” in Spanish. His black hair is slicked back and his left hand is folded over his right, his watch around his wrist to keep track of the time he has lost.

“My only preparation for the fast was thinking of my son in jail and thinking there will be an end to this,” Valdez says.

Valdez and five other fasting activists are part of a growing number of immigrants around the country who are taking dramatic steps to call on President Barack Obama to halt deportations. If Congress won’t act, the Latino community expects the Democratic president they helped elect to do more. For Valdez, it is about more than just the deportation of his son, Jaime Arturo Valdez Reyes, who was apprehended a year ago for driving drunk and placed in deportation proceedings. Valdez says he already lost another son to deportation – a son who was killed when he was sent back to Mexico – and he knows too many families in his shoes.

Desperate, frustrated and no longer willing to wait, Latinos are beginning to distance themselves from Democrats and refocus their attention and attacks on a president who can act unilaterally from the White House, instead of on a Congress stymied by gridlock. 

Across the country, immigrant communities are fervidly calling on Obama to halt deportations as they realize Congress isn’t likely to act in 2014, ahead of the midterm elections. Activists say demonstrations like the one in Phoenix are expected to pop up around the nation: Last week, protesters from the United Methodist Church and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network were arrested outside the north gate of the White House. United We Dream, an immigration advocacy group, says it has begun working to get out the vote in states like Texas and Nevada for any lawmaker, Democrat or Republican, who has taken direct action to push immigration reform through Congress this year.

“The more the Congress refuses to move, the more the administration is going to see action from us,” says Maria Fernanda Cabello, an organizer for United We Dream.

Immigrants in the Latino community are demanding more from a president and a party that has already taken bigger steps toward immigration reform than many of their Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives. In June 2012, the president announced a program that has stopped the deportation of hundreds of thousands of young people who had entered the U.S. illegally as children. Obama also has delivered countless speeches touting the importance of immigrants to the fabric of the economy, and in November, he promised a group of fasting immigrants on the National Mall that reform was on its way.

But speeches and promises are no longer enough.

Overshadowing Obama’s progress, activists say, is his administration’s aggressive deportation rate, which has outpaced many prior administrations. The most recent records show 1.9 million immigrants have been removed from the country since Obama became president. The administration maintains it prioritizes the removal of criminals before it goes after immigrants simply living and working in the U.S. without permission.

“There is a new emerging consensus that the president can do more,” says Chris Newman, the legal director at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a group advocating to halt deportations. “There is now a clear consensus that we cannot just accept the Democratic Party seeking advantage from an intractable status quo.”

Politically, Republicans look to gain the most from immigration reform. With that off the table, the GOP could begin courting Latino voters with their economic message. That could mean a smaller share of Latino votes for Democrats, and some are accusing the president of sitting back as a way to perpetuate the status quo.

“It is undeniable that immigration reform has been held hostage by a xenophobic, paranoid and nativist wing of the Republican Party. The question is whether that fact is something Democrats are willing to resign themselves to in an effort to exploit it politically,” says Newman.

When it comes to halting deportations, Obama has said his hands are tied, and there is nothing more he can do to ease the pain of immigrant communities who say their families are being torn apart.

“The easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws,” Obama told a heckler during an immigration speech in California in November.

Yet legal experts challenge the president’s interpretation of those laws. Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law School, says that the executive branch has wider prosecutorial discretion than the White House is letting on. The problem, he argues, isn’t that Obama can’t stop deportations. It’s the simple fact that doing so is a political risk, and one the president doesn’t want to take.

“He has wide legal authority, but you have to balance that against the will of the people and politically what you can get through Congress if you push your executive authority too far,” Yale-Loehr says.

Pressure from immigrant communities, which have overwhelmingly supported Democrats in the past, puts the Obama administration in a tight spot. If the president ignores immigrants’ requests, he could lose electoral support. In the midterm elections, Democrats could see Latino voters stay home in places like Florida and Colorado, where their votes could be the difference between a Republican or Democrat winning a seat in Congress. Yet, if Obama does act, he could jeopardize his ability to negotiate on a comprehensive immigration package down the road in 2015, after Republicans likely have maintained control of the House and perhaps even taken back the Senate.

If Obama charges ahead without Congress, Republican attacks saying the president “does not enforce the laws on the books” could be validated. If the president stops deportations now, that gives Republicans more ammunition, more proof and more evidence to drag their feet on comprehensive reform, some Republican lawmakers say. 

“If the president halts deportations, he loses trust,” says Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. “It contributes to the opponents of immigration reform who say that the president doesn’t want to enforce the law.”

But if Obama does nothing, activists say it’s a guarantee that more families – like that of Valdez – will continue to be torn apart.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com