American Limbo

New Yorker (Opinion)

Jeffrey Toobin

July 20, 2015

American Limbo 

Olga Flores, the seventh of eleven siblings, was born in a small town in the central Mexican state of Hidalgo thirty-nine years ago. “There was no work,” she told me recently. “The only thing for a woman to do was to get married, have children, and cook for her whole life.” A job in a nearby city would have required a high-school certificate, but her education ended in middle school. So in January of 1998, when she was twenty-one, Flores arranged to come to the United States illegally. She took her first trip on an airplane, to northern Mexico, and made her way to Sonoyta, a town on the Arizona border.

One of her brothers had immigrated to Columbus, Ohio, a few years earlier, and he helped her make arrangements to cross into the U.S. “There were about a dozen of us,” she recalled. “It was a small truck, with the seats taken out. They told us to lie down in the back, head to feet, feet to head, so there would be room for everyone.” They drove for about three hours, stopped at a mobile home in the desert, then continued on to Phoenix. A friend had set up another ride, which would take them across the country, to Ohio. “It was so cold, and I didn’t have a jacket,” Flores said. “We slept in the car and ate at McDonald’s. It was the first burger I ever had. It was very tasty.” When she reached Columbus, she paid her brother a thousand dollars, which he turned over to the guides, or coyotes, who had made the trip possible.

Eventually, Flores got a job as a cashier at a Wendy’s. “It was really hard for me, because I couldn’t tell what the Americans wanted,” she said. “When I learned more English, I started taking orders.” She soon met David Flores, who was also in the United States illegally. They got married and had twin boys, David and Luis, in 2000, and a third son, Iker, four years ago. “David has always been a really good person and a really good father,” Flores said. “In Mexico, we are used to men not washing dishes and not doing anything around the house, and he is the opposite.” Today, David operates a taco truck, which he stations in a parking lot near the small duplex apartment where the family lives, just outside Columbus. David is in the truck from 11 A.M. to 9 P.M. on weekdays, and on Sundays he works at McDonald’s. When Olga is not caring for the children, she is in her kitchen, preparing the rice, intestines, and tongue for the truck.

Like many people who have arrived illegally from Mexico, Flores has built a productive life here. She is a longtime resident, has no criminal record, and is the parent of American citizens. Through much of Barack Obama’s Presidency, there was a political near-consensus regarding the need to address the status of immigrants like Flores. Under the immigration-reform law passed by the Senate in 2013, she would have had a path to become a citizen; under the executive actions announced by President Obama in 2014, she could have obtained work papers and a driver’s license. But the House failed to vote on the Senate’s immigration bill, and a federal court in Texas has placed Obama’s initiative on hold.

The result is a comprehensive breakdown in public policy. During the Obama Administration, which purports to be dedicated to easing the plight of residents like her, Flores and her peers have faced greater threats of deportation than at any time in decades. Republicans, for their part, have ended their brief experiment, reflected in the Senate bill, in bipartisanship on immigration. The Party is now close to united in opposition to any initiative that might offer Flores and others the chance to become American citizens. Flores, and the roughly eleven million people in similar situations, have no choice but to wait and worry.

Donald Trump, in his speech announcing his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination, in June, addressed the issue of illegal immigration from Mexico. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” (The crime rate among first-generation immigrants is significantly lower than that of the general population, according to Bianca Bersani, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts-Boston.) Trump’s remarks prompted several of his business partners, including Univision and Macy’s, to sever their ties with him, but the comments have led to relatively little examination of the lives of the immigrants themselves.

For many years, Flores’s legal status existed for her as a kind of background anxiety, affecting her life in modest ways. Because traffic stops by the police could lead to deportation, she drove the family car as little as possible, and never out of state. “Here, at least, we know the city, we know the streets, we know which are one-way or two-way,” she said. “If we go somewhere else, we are scared that we don’t know the area.” Now her situation has taken on a new urgency. Early this year, her son Iker had a series of infections that proved resistant to treatment. “The first two times that I took him to the doctor, they said it was an ear infection and then a throat infection, and they did not draw blood. On the fourteenth of February, we noticed that he had some red dots on his ears. That’s when they drew blood. Four days later, they told me he had cancer of the blood”—acute lymphocytic leukemia. Iker has begun a course of chemotherapy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, in Columbus, which is likely to take three or four years.

“Before I had children, I thought about what if the police would pick me up—I would just leave, go back to Mexico, even though I haven’t been there in a long time,” Flores told me. “Now that my child is sick, I really do worry. Medicine back home is very different. When you go to the doctor, you have to take money before things happen. He has a higher probability of surviving in the United States. Now we have to stay.”

When I visited the Floreses’ apartment, Olga demonstrated a trick with sour cream that she had learned during a stint working at Chipotle. She emptied a five-pound jar into a metal bowl, then whipped it with a wooden spoon. “If you whip it first, it comes out of the squirt bottles easier,” she said. The family’s duplex is in a town-house development. There are two refrigerators squeezed into the kitchen, to accommodate the restaurant-size quantities of food that the family must buy and prepare every week for the taco truck. Iker sat on the sofa watching cartoons on a big-screen television. He’s an outgoing kid, who moves seamlessly between English and Spanish, but he has been having a tough time with the chemotherapy. He’s weak and very thin, and has trouble keeping food down. Lately, he has been struggling to walk up the stairs to his bedroom, so Olga is carrying him around more than she once did. His brothers help out, but at this moment they were at the truck, helping their father.

Shortly after Iker’s cancer was diagnosed, Flores went to see Julie Nemecek, an immigration lawyer in Columbus, to ask about her options for establishing a more secure basis for remaining in the United States. Nemecek had handled many similar cases before. “Most of the people I hear from have been in Ohio for a long time, and the vast majority are undocumented, because they snuck across the border,” she said. “They have made lives here. They have been in hiding, hoping that when they drive to work or take their kids to school they won’t get stopped.” Nemecek offers clients like Flores little reassurance. “Everything is in limbo, so people are uncertain, and they feel hopeless,” she said.

When Barack Obama ran for the Presidency, he pledged to enact comprehensive immigration reform, but he didn’t push the issue in his first two years in office, when Democrats had strong majorities in both houses of Congress. Instead, he made what became known as a “down payment” for a bipartisan immigration bill later in his Presidency.

“There was definitely in the Obama Administration an intention to do tough enforcement as a down payment for comprehensive immigration reform later,” Marc Rosenblum, of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, said. Rosenblum is the deputy director of the institute’s U.S.-immigration-policy program. “The idea was to prove to Republicans that he could be trusted on enforcement, so that he could get a path to citizenship in return.”

The first part of the down payment was to toughen enforcement at the Mexican border. Under Obama, a record number of agents are patrolling the border: nearly twenty thousand, roughly five times as many as there were two decades ago. In the light of this change, the Obama Administration has claimed that the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border has reached a forty-year low. (The faltering economy during Obama’s first term, which made the United States a less promising destination, was certainly another important factor in the decline.)

The more controversial part of Obama’s down payment involved immigrants who had already arrived and settled in the United States. The Administration greatly expanded a program known as Secure Communities, in which information was shared between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the F.B.I. Whenever anyone was arrested and booked, his or her fingerprints would be sent to the F.B.I., as before, but now the information would also go to the immigration authorities. “It was a huge force multiplier,” Rosenblum said. “The program was pitched as a tool to find serious criminals, but, at least initially, the vast majority of people were picked up for traffic violations and very minor offenses. A lot of these people ended up being deported.” Julie Nemecek recalled, “Around 2010, the number of my Mexican clients increased, with enforcement getting really, really heavy because of Secure Communities. People were getting picked up left and right when their only offense was driving without a license or drunk driving.” As a result of tougher enforcement, deportations soared under Obama. Since 2009, removals of illegal immigrants have averaged more than four hundred thousand per year, compared with an average of two hundred and fifty thousand per year under George W. Bush.

Secure Communities had an enormous impact on the day-to-day lives of Latinos in the United States. “There are people who are not a safety threat who are snared into the deportation apparatus,” Clarissa Martínez, the deputy vice-president of the National Council of La Raza, a leading Hispanic-rights organization, told me. “Also, when you start deputizing local law enforcement to help apply immigration law, you are going to have abuses, and that’s what happened. People feel that regardless of whether you are first-, second-, third-generation American, the folks who are going to be stopped are going to be Latinos.” Rosenblum said, “Until the last decade or so, the chances were, if you made it past the border, you were not going to get deported, unless you were committing serious crimes. But, with the crackdown, the broader immigrant community felt under attack. They lived here, and suddenly they were unable to work, unable to drive.”

Still, the underlying theory was that Secure Communities would be the stick, and comprehensive immigration reform would be the carrot—and the goal appeared within reach after Obama was reëlected, in 2012. The defeat of Mitt Romney brought Republicans to the realization that they had to broaden their appeal to Hispanics, the fastest-growing group of potential voters in the nation. In March of 2013, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, released a report that said the Party “must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform.” In short order, many Republicans in the Senate, including such prominent figures as John McCain and Marco Rubio, did just that, and a bill that included a path to citizenship for people like Olga Flores passed by a vote of sixty-eight to thirty-two.

The battle over immigration reform presents a clash of fundamentally different visions of the role of the federal government. The President and his allies assert that their position is based on a combination of realism and compassion. They argue that it’s impossible to deport all of the country’s illegal immigrants. In addition, they say, it’s heartless to break up families who are long settled in the United States.

Opponents of reform, who are led by Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator from Alabama, believe that national security, along with the rule of law, compels a different approach. “If everyone who enters the country illegally can stay and become a citizen, that just encourages more people to come illegally,” Sessions told me. “If people see that they have nothing to fear after they cross the border and settle here, then that creates an incentive for more people to come, and that’s wrong. If they are here illegally, they should be deported.” What’s more, he argues, a porous border invites criminals, including terrorists, to settle in the promised land of the United States.

Yet John Boehner, the Republican Speaker of the House, and Eric Cantor, the Majority Leader, described themselves as supporters of immigration reform, and it was clear after the 2012 election that the votes were there to pass it. “Boehner promised the President that he was going to bring a bill to the floor,” a former White House aide told me. “There’s always a significant House-versus-Senate rivalry, so the Senate bill itself was going to be a nonstarter in the House. But some sort of reform bill was sure to pass if it came to a vote.” Virtually all of the Democrats in the House, as well as some Republicans, supported comprehensive reform along the lines of the Senate bill, but immigration reform was anathema to the Tea Party. Boehner asked staff from the House leadership to come up with a proposal that modified the Senate bill without gutting it. The result was an outline of recommendations, but conservatives in the House persuaded Boehner to back away from them.

After the passage of the Senate bill, chances for any sort of reform bill in the House began to recede. The government shutdown, for two weeks in October of 2013, poisoned relations between the President and congressional Republicans. Then, on June 10, 2014, Cantor lost a primary to a poorly funded and largely unknown challenger, who focussed his campaign on Cantor’s alleged softness on illegal immigration. The victor, David Brat, went on to win the seat. Republican support for reform suddenly vanished. As the former White House aide told me, “There was always this germ of hope, but then Eric Cantor lost his primary. There was probably a five-per-cent chance before that, and it went to zero.”

Olga Flores speaks English imperfectly, so some of our conversations were interpreted by Jessica Pantaleon Camacho, who works as an assistant in Julie Nemecek’s law office. Pantaleon Camacho was born in Mexico twenty years ago and brought to the U.S. illegally as a three-year-old. “When I started going to high school, I convinced myself that school was the only way I could get my family out of the situation,” she told me. “I took all Advanced Placement classes starting in my sophomore year. I graduated near the top of my class.” Her teachers wrote enthusiastic recommendations to colleges, and Pantaleon Camacho was accepted at several schools, with scholarship offers. “When I was about to graduate, we had to decide what school,” she said. “That’s when they told me that I needed a Social Security number. I wasn’t able to provide it.”

Pantaleon Camacho is among the “Dreamers,” the term that has come to define the group of people who were brought illegally to the United States when they were children. The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, known as the DREAM Act, was presented several years ago as a modest alternative to the round of comprehensive immigration reform that was stalled in Congress at the time. The law would provide a path to citizenship for people like Pantaleon Camacho, who had essentially lived their entire lives as Americans. It failed, and the President began taking a series of unilateral executive actions designed to ease the plight of the Dreamers. On June 15, 2012, the Obama Administration announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. The program would give as many as 1.7 million people work authorization and a two-year reprieve from deportation, which was renewable for another two years. In most cases, this meant that the Dreamers were also eligible for driver’s licenses and, in some states, for in-state tuition at state universities. Almost eight hundred thousand individuals applied for DACA coverage, and about eighty-four per cent of them were approved.

Pantaleon Camacho was one of them. “It has changed my life,” she told me. “I have a Social Security number and a driver’s license. I am able to drive without fear of being pulled over and being sent back to Mexico.” Her job in the lawyer’s office is on the books. She was admitted to Bowling Green, a state university in Ohio, but she is ineligible for any scholarship assistance, so she takes classes at a local community college. “It all comes out of my own pocket,” Pantaleon Camacho told me. Her situation is much improved but still tenuous: her DACA status expires roughly at the end of the Obama Administration, and no one knows what the next President will do with the program.

DACA did nothing to help families like the Floreses, in which the parents came to the U.S. as adults and the children were born here. By 2014, immigration activists began putting greater pressure on Obama to take executive action to help more families. “When Boehner pulled out of the process, that’s when there was a total focus on the President, because the legislative door had been shut,” Clarissa Martínez, of La Raza, said. The White House felt the heat. “There was a period in 2014 when the immigration activists gave up on Congress and said it’s now on the President,” the former White House aide said. “They started calling him Deporter-in-Chief. The President brought them all in. He said by criticizing him they were letting the Republicans off the hook. He said he needed more time. He said, ‘I will do everything I can at the end of the summer.’ ” But Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races, like Kay Hagan, in North Carolina, implored the White House not to take any controversial steps on immigration before the midterm elections. Obama agreed; activists seethed; virtually all the Democratic candidates, including Hagan, lost anyway.

Finally, on November 20, 2014, just a few weeks after the elections, Obama launched his long-awaited series of executive actions on immigration. As the President explained in a rare prime-time address from the White House, the centerpiece was an initiative called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, known as DAPA. This program, which would be run by the Department of Homeland Security, was aimed at the parents of American citizens who were themselves illegally in the country but had been law-abiding residents of the United States since 2010. Following a case-by-case review, they would receive an immigration status known as “deferred action,” enabling them to apply for work permits and driver’s licenses. DAPA was intended to cover about 3.6 million people, more than thirty per cent of the illegal immigrants in the United States. The D.H.S. made plans to hire as many as three thousand new employees, some of whom would work in Arlington, Virginia, in an eleven-story building that the government leased for $7.8 million a year. (Also on November 20th, Obama expanded eligibility for the DACA program, and replaced Secure Communities with a program that targets serious criminals.) According to Obama’s plan, the government would begin accepting applications for deferred action under DAPA in February, 2015.

“DAPA is of tremendous magnitude,” Clarissa Martínez said. “It’s what Americans want of the undocumented community—that they come forward, go through criminal-background checks, and those who are working do so legally. For the American public, it sounds practical and pragmatic to give people who have deep roots in the community and have good moral character a chance to get right with the law. The announcement of these programs was an incredible step forward and the biggest progress we’ve seen on the issue in two decades.”

The Floreses pride themselves on using fresh, authentic ingredients for their food truck. Olga showed off a large maguey leaf, from a variety of agave, which David was about to cut up, toast, and use as a seasoning for the meat before he grilled it. “The best things,” Olga said.

Olga Flores has not closely followed the twists and turns in immigration policy, but, like most immigrants, she was aware of DAPA and planned to take advantage of it. There is a cruel asymmetry to immigration law: the people with the most at stake have the most trouble understanding it. This is because, even for lawyers, immigration law is notoriously complicated. It’s related to, but ultimately very different from, other criminal or civil litigation; immigration law has its own traditions and doctrines—and the rules often change. For civilians, the morass is difficult to navigate, and for non-English-speaking immigrants the law can be nearly impenetrable. Still, everyone knew that Obama’s November 20th directives were hugely significant. On the night of Obama’s speech, many immigration-rights groups around the country held viewing parties to celebrate the news. Flores was hopeful, too. “We were very excited,” she told me.

But two weeks after Obama’s announcement Texas and sixteen other states sued the federal government to stop the DAPA program. Eight states joined later. The heart of the case against the Administration is the contention that Obama overstepped his authority in establishing the program. “The case isn’t about any particular immigration policy; it’s about the rule of law,” Scott Keller, the Texas solicitor general, told me. “DAPArewrites the immigration statutes, and the executive does not have unilateral authority to do that. Congress has not granted the executive the power to deem people who are unlawfully in the country to be eligible for work permits, Medicare, unemployment benefits, and access to international travel. Congress has done quite the opposite. The executive can’t do it alone.”

Obama Administration lawyers fired back from several directions. First, they argued that Texas and the other states lacked standing—that is, that they had no right to file the case in the first place, because DAPA imposed no obligations on the states. “The core of Texas’s argument is that they will have to pay for driver’s licenses for the beneficiaries of DAPA,” an Administration official told me. “But that’s not enough to get them standing. It’s a very incidental expense, and they could raise their prices to cover it, anyway. States don’t get to sue just because they don’t like the policies of the federal government, and that’s what this case is really about.” The plaintiffs have argued that they have standing because DAPA will encourage illegal immigration, which would be an imposition on states. Yet fourteen states and the District of Columbia filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of DAPA, asserting that the program would actually help, not burden, individual states. “When immigrants are able to work legally—even for a limited time—their wages increase, they seek work compatible with their skill level, and they enhance their skills to obtain higher wages, all of which benefits State economies by increasing income and growing the tax base,” the brief explains.

On the merits, too, Administration lawyers argued that the President was within his rights to extend these benefits to undocumented people. “This whole case is a matter of enforcement priorities,” the official said. “We can deport four hundred thousand people a year, but we can’t deport all eleven million undocumented people here, so the President has a right to establish his priorities for the limited time he is in office. And he’s saying that he is not going to deport people with children and ties to the community who are willing to undergo a background check.” George H. W. Bush had a similar program for a select group of immigrants, and it proceeded with little fanfare and no legal challenge.

Like the plaintiffs in many civil cases, the Texas solicitor general had wide latitude in choosing the court where he wanted to file the suit. Lawyers often do some judge-shopping if they think it will help them win their cases, and it was quickly evident that the Texas lawyers shopped wisely. Keller’s predecessor brought the lawsuit in Brownsville, close to the Mexican border. The local federal judge assigned to the case, Andrew Hanen, had already shown a marked hostility toward President Obama’s immigration policies. Hanen had been appointed to the district court in 2002 by George W. Bush, and, in earlier rulings, he had called the President’s deportation policy “misguided” and asserted that it “endangers America.”

According to the President’s plan, the government was going to begin accepting applications for deferred action under DAPA on February 18th. Less than forty-eight hours before the program went into effect, Judge Hanen filed a hundred-and-twenty-three-page opinion issuing a preliminary injunction that put DAPA on hold. In the case known as Texas v. United States, he ruled that Texas and the other states did have standing to challenge the law, and then he ruled against the Administration on an esoteric but important matter. Hanen held that the Administration had failed to follow the correct procedures in putting DAPA into effect; he said that the Department of Homeland Security should have given the public the chance to be heard in what’s known as notice-and-comment rule-making before implementing the new policy. The opinion did not directly address the underlying legality of DAPA, but the judge offered clear hints that he was dubious about the program. DAPA “does not represent mere inadequacy; it is complete abdication,” Hanen wrote. “The D.H.S. does have discretion in the manner in which it chooses to fulfill the expressed will of Congress. It cannot, however, enact a program whereby it not only ignores the dictates of Congress, but actively acts to thwart them.”

In a further rebuff to the Administration, Judge Hanen issued a stay on DAPA covering the entire country, even though his jurisdiction covered  only part of Texas. Administration lawyers rushed an appeal of Hanen’s stay to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—one of the most conservative circuits in the country. On May 26th, a panel of the appeals court ruled, two judges to one, that Hanen was correct to enjoin DAPA. Earlier this month, during a hearing before another three-judge panel, the same two judges maintained their skepticism about Obama’s immigration initiative. Regardless of what the Fifth Circuit ultimately rules, the losing party will still have the right to appeal to the Supreme Court. As Jeff Sessions, Obama’s chief adversary in Congress, put it, “The courts may take longer than the President will be in office.” The Department of Homeland Security has put the plan to hire three thousand people to administer DAPA on indefinite hold.

It’s always been a key part of the Administration’s plan to establish DAPA before the end of Obama’s term, making it difficult for any successor to withdraw a benefit that has already been granted. But by delaying his actions until after the 2014 midterms the President may have given his opponents, in Congress and in the courts, the time and the tools to unravel his most important work on immigration.

The oncology and hematology clinic of Nationwide Children’s Hospital is a determinedly sunny place. The furniture in the waiting room is colorful, the pictures on the walls cheerful. Entertainment options for the young patients abound. Iker Flores perched himself on an examination table and quickly lost himself in a video game. His prognosis is good; his cancer has a very high survival rate. Iker has become used to the chemo port affixed to his chest. But the treatment sessions, which last as long as twelve hours at a time, are gruelling. This visit was to check his blood to see if he was ready for a chemo session the next day. The doctors decided to put off treatment for a little while to allow Iker to regain some strength.

The strain on the family, financial and otherwise, is considerable. The Flores children have health insurance through a nonprofit company in Ohio called CareSource, and the hospital has not pressed them for additional payments. But Olga had to give up part-time work cleaning houses to take care of Iker. He had been attending a Head Start program when he became sick, but he’s had to drop out. “The timing for DAPA was perfect for us,” Olga told me. “Even a few days before he was diagnosed, he was going to school nine to two. Now he can’t even go to school. I was helping my husband. Now I can’t work.”

At one point, immigration represented a kind of exception to the polarization that dominates contemporary politics in Washington. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama pushed Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. And the Senate passed its bipartisan immigration bill only two years ago. But, as the Presidential campaign has heated up, the issue has come to split the parties in stark ways. “The experience under Obama and Bush has upped the ante on what we want to hear from candidates that are vying for the Presidency in 2016,” Clarissa Martínez said. “Both Obama and Bush said they wanted to get it done, and their hearts may have been in the right place, but they both ran into trouble with Congress. That’s why hearing that somebody believes in immigration reform is not good enough. We want to know what they will do on their own as President.”

Trump’s comments about immigrants from Mexico drew condemnation from many Republicans for his impolitic tone, but, in their substance, his views are widely shared within the Party. At various times, Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, and Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor, all supported versions of immigration reform that would allow people like Olga Flores to become citizens. All have tacked right. Bush has talked recently of a path to “legalized status” for undocumented aliens rather than a path to citizenship; he also said recently that he would repeal DACA and DAPA. Rubio has said that he now favors a piecemeal approach to immigration, rather than a comprehensive bill; and Walker recently said, “I don’t believe in amnesty” for those who have entered the country illegally. Rubio and Walker have also denounced DACA and DAPA. The other Republican candidates have talked about immigration almost exclusively in terms of border enforcement. Ted Cruz, the Texas senator, recently asked a group of supporters to “imagine a President that finally, finally, finally secures the borders,” and he criticized Obama’s “lawlessness and the President’s unconstitutional executive amnesty.”

Hillary Clinton, in contrast, has staked out a position to the left of President Obama. In an appearance in Las Vegas, in May, Clinton said, “We can’t wait any longer for a path to full and equal citizenship.” She said it was “beyond absurd” to think that all eleven million illegal immigrants in the country could be deported. And she said that she would expand DACA and DAPA. “If Congress continues to refuse to act, as President I would do everything possible under the law to go even further,” she said, suggesting, for example, that she would extend protection to the parents of Dreamers.

For now, though, the only certainty for Olga Flores and others in similar situations is more uncertainty. If Clinton wins, and Congress remains in Republican hands, the new President will be reduced to attempting the same kind of piecemeal executive actions as Obama—if the courts even allow those to proceed. If a Republican wins, Flores’s chances of deportation will rise. Either way, the issue will remain on the national agenda, even as the opportunity to come to any solution continues to recede.

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