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National Council of La Raza leader calls Barack Obama ‘deporter-in-chief’
By: Reid J. Epstein March 4, 2014 06:00 AM EST |
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President Barack Obama has lost the nation’s largest Latino advocacy organization.
The National Council of La Raza is set to
declare Obama “the deporter-in-chief” and demand that he take unilateral
action to stop deportations.
NCLR, the nation’s largest Latino advocacy
organization, had been the last significant progressive grass-roots
immigration-reform organization publicly defending the White House
immigration stance. NCLR President Janet Murguía will on Tuesday night
demand Obama put a halt to his administration’s deportations.
“For the president, I think his legacy is
at stake here,” Murguía said in an interview in advance of NCLR’s annual
Capital Awards dinner, where she will deliver a speech lambasting
Obama’s deportation policy. “We consider him the deportation president,
or the deporter-in-chief.”
By April, Obama will have overseen more
than 2 million deportations, activists say, far more than any previous
president. Obama has insisted — including when he was interrupted by a protester— that Congress has tied his hands and he cannot reduce the number of people being deported unilaterally. Latino groups are planning a series of mass demonstrations April 5 to protest the deportations and force lawmakers to choose between criticizing Obama or facing a populist wrath.
Murguía said NCLR has been privately
urging the White House for months to do something about deportations —
which will soon number 2 million since Obama took office. The group was
also using its megaphone to blame Congress and not Obama for the
deportations. Just three weeks ago, NCLR called for an
end “to unnecessary deportations” and asked supporters to “ask
Republican leadership to take a stand for family values and pass
immigration reform.”
Now that focus is being directed at the White House.
“We
respectfully disagree with the president on his ability to stop
unnecessary deportations,” Murguía will say during a Tuesday night
speech to NCLR’s annual Capital Awards dinner, according to prepared
remarks. “He can stop tearing families apart. He can stop throwing
communities and businesses into chaos. He can stop turning a blind eye
to the harm being done. He does have the power to stop this. Failure to
act will be a shameful legacy for his presidency.”
The White House has deep ties with NCLR.
Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council,
was NCLR’s director of research and advocacy before joining the
administration. But NCLR faced pressure from its members and from other
grass-roots immigration organizations that have been agitating for Obama
to halt deportations.
POLITICO reported last month that
NCLR and the Center for American Progress were virtually alone among
progressive immigration groups in defending the White House — criticism
that stung Murguía.
“There have been different times when
we’ve hit the president pretty hard,” she said. “But I know not
everybody agrees with that.”
Tuesday’s push, Murguía said, will be part
of what she described as a “three-pronged” strategy. NCLR will continue
to press Congress and aims to register 250,000 new Latino voters ahead
of the November midterm elections.
Murguía said people no longer believe Obama cannot act alone.
“Their
credibility is growing thinner and thinner by the day and people know
that they did it before and I think we believe that they can do it
again,” she said.
It’s not the first time NCLR has crossed
Obama on deportations — though Murguía’s remarks do mark the first time
NCLR’s leadership has done so in such a direct and public manner. Obama
was heckled by a large portion of the crowd during a June 2011 speech to
NCLR — protesters chanted “yes you can” at him to send a message that
he should halt deportations.
A year later, during the midst of his
reelection campaign, Obama announced deferred action for so-called
Dreamers, allowing young people brought illegally to the United States
as children a path to citizenship.
The White House has said it does not have
authority to take a similar step again. Press secretary Jay Carney last
week reiterated Obama’s position that only Congress can halt the
deportations.
“The job of the executive branch is to
carry out the laws that are passed by Congress,” Carney told reporters
last week . “The administration has taken a series of steps to focus our
resources and make immigration enforcement more strategic, including
focusing on criminals and the use of deferred action for young
immigrants known as Dreamers. The only permanent solution is a
legislative one that would provide a broad-based path to earned
citizenship, and that can only be achieved by Congress. It can’t be
achieved by the president.”
Obama has gone mostly silent on
immigration in recent months in an attempt to give House Republicans
political space to push their own immigration reform bills. He hasn’t
made a major immigration speech since November and devoted just 120
words to it during his State of the Union address in January. And the
president has limited his Spanish-language media appearances to radio
interviews focused on the Affordable Care Act, limiting his exposure to
uncomfortable questions about deportations or the congressional
immigration stalemate.
Murguía said the White House deportation
policy began as an effort to win credibility among Republicans but has
careened out of control. She said Obama sought to deport more people
than had President George W. Bush to get Republicans to cooperate on a
larger immigration reform bill — a strategy that has not worked in the
House.
“I don’t think it’s lost on anyone that
there may have been a strategy in place to demonstrate they were tough
on deportations,” Murguía said. “Former [Homeland Security] Secretary
Janet Napolitano didn’t shy away from the notion that if we can show
we’re tough on deportation, we’ll be able to get some of these
Republicans to come around.”
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