Wall Street Journal
By Laura Meckler
October 5, 2015
Hillary
Clinton distanced herself from President Barack Obama’s immigration
policies in an interview with the Spanish-language network Telemundo,
accusing the White House
of breaking up families through an aggressive deportation policy.
Her
comments echoed long-running complaints of the immigration advocacy
community that Mr. Obama’s immigration policy has been overly harsh. But
they stand in contrast
to comments Mrs. Clinton made in June 2014 defending the Obama policy,
where she said the president was doing all he could within the law to
keep families together. They also appeared to ignore changes in
deportation policy that Mr. Obama ordered in late 2014.
Speaking
to Telemundo, the Democratic presidential candidate criticized Mr.
Obama’s policy but said his approach was part of a strategy aimed at
winning over Republicans
to support immigration legislation legalizing people in the U.S.
illegally.
“The
deportation laws were interpreted and enforced, you know, very
aggressively during the last six and a half years, which I think his
administration did in part to
try to get Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform,”
she said. “That strategy is no longer workable. So therefore I think we
have to go back to being a much less harsh and aggressive enforcer.”
She
said she would continue to deport violent people and felons but said
too many “upright, productive people” with a minor offense had been
“hauled in and deported. And
I’ve met their wives and their children. And I just don’t believe in
that.”
She
said she would order these changes within her first 100 days in office
by directing her Department of Homeland Security to “take a hard look
about how we change the
way the laws are applied.”
Her
comments essentially ignored changes Mr. Obama ordered in November 2014
to prioritize the deportation of people with serious criminal
convictions, gang members and
recent border crossers. That action all but directed that most other
illegal immigrants could continue living in the U.S. without fear of
removal.
Mrs.
Clinton has worked hard to win over Hispanic voters, an important
constituency in the Democratic Party, and by and large, she remains
popular with this group.
Mrs.
Clinton also repeated her promise to expand upon Mr. Obama’s move to
grant relief from deportation and issue work permits to some four million undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for at least five years and who have children who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents, a policy now
being challenged in court. The Obama administration offers the same opportunity to young people brought to the U.S. as children,
known as Dreamers; that piece is not under court review.
Telemundo’s
Maria Celeste Arraras pressed Mrs. Clinton as to whether she could
really go further than Mr. Obama, given that his action is currently
being challenged in
the courts as executive overreach.
Mrs.
Clinton replied that she would consider additional people for
deportation relief who are not covered under the Obama orders. But she
didn’t promise to make an entire
new group eligible for relief, such as the parents of Dreamers.
“I
want to do more on an individual basis by putting more resources, more
personnel into the system to try to help as many people as possible get a
different status,”
she said.
She
also repeated that should would keep fighting to get Congress to
approve an immigration bill, something Mr. Obama tried and failed to do.
Her
comments stand in contrast to what she said in June 2014, when she
defended the Obama administration’s immigration policies. In an
interview then with CNN, she suggested
that Mr. Obama was doing all he could to conduct a humane immigration
policy, given his authority.
“We
have to understand the difficulty that President Obama finds himself in
because there are laws that impose certain obligations on him,” she
said in 2014. “And it was
my understanding that the numbers have been moderating in part as the
Department of Homeland Security and other law enforcement officials
understood that separating children from families … that is just not who
we are as Americans.”
A
spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee said she flip-flopped
her view. “Hillary Clinton defended President Obama’s record on
deportations just last year saying
he was legally obligated but now that her poll numbers are hitting rock
bottom she’s singing a different tune,” said Ruth Guerra, the RNC’s
director of Hispanic media.
A White House spokeswoman declined to offer an immediate comment.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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