Fighting for their right to stay in the only country they know. (Jeff Topping / Reuters)
Last week I
noted that while renewed talk about immigration reform from the White House was welcome, it would also look like just election-year posturing unless Obama backed it up with action. And while there's no way Republicans allow a comprehensive immigration reform bill to pass this Congress, there were steps Obama could unilaterally take.
Apparently, his administration has taken what I hope is just the first of those steps, even if it's a tentative and confused step:
The about-face by ICE in Ms. Zanella’s case is an example of the kind of action Democratic lawmakers and Latino and immigrant groups have been demanding from the Obama administration to slow deportations of illegal immigrants who have not been convicted of crimes. In particular, pressure is increasing on President Obama to offer protection from deportation to illegal immigrant college students who might have been eligible for legal status under a bill in Congress known as the Dream Act [...]
Homeland Security officials have said their focus is increasingly on removing immigrants who are convicted criminals. That, in fact, is what an ICE official told Ms. Zanella in explaining the new decision in her case.
The agent said ICE “was supposed to be concentrating on criminals, not on Dream students,” said Ralph Isenberg, a Dallas businessman who advocates for immigrants and made it his cause to prevent Ms. Zanella from being deported. Mr. Isenberg’s challenges to ICE had kept Ms. Zanella in the country even after the final date for her deportation in February.
This is exactly what immigrant advocates have been asking about when dealing with DREAMers -- the undocumented children of undocumented immigrants who are either going to college or want to join the military. However, this is apparently not an explicit directive, at least not yet:
But nationwide the administration’s deportations policy remains confused and erratically implemented, immigration lawyers said, with many students and immigrants without criminal records being deported.
“The administration needs to make it clear to the public and to the rank and file within ICE that it has a firm and clear policy of enforcing the law within its priorities and discouraging going after cases that are not within its priorities,” said Gregory Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “But that is just not happening consistently.”
Hopefully, this confusion is just a matter of communicating the new policy through the chain of command.