FW: Obama praises DREAM Act While Deporting Dreamers

[Rosi Carrasco]

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To: laborex...@organizerweb.com
Subject: Obama praises DREAM Act While Deporting Dreamers
From: labore...@aol.com
Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:00:21 -0500

Citizen Orange

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Obama Praises DREAM Act While Deporting Dreamers Posted: 22 Dec 2010 09:07 PM PST President Obama publicly committed today to passing the DREAM Act in 2011. He called the recent vote blocking the bill in the Senate his "biggest disappointment." White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said that grassroots activism will be essential to getting the DREAM Act passed. Hearing these comments, I had to scratch my head. I have seen a lot of grassroots activism around the DREAM Act over the last couple years. Some of the most intense organizing has come from communities fighting to keep individual Dreamers from being deported ... by President Obama's immigration enforcement agency, ICE. I have consulted on several such cases, and represented Dreamers directly in a few. In nearly every case I've seen, ICE fought tooth and nail to keep Dreamers locked up and get them deported. ICE attorneys often took harsh litigating positions with the goal of moving Dreamers out of the country as quickly as possible. ICE deportation officers often shut down requests to release Dreamers to pursue removal defense outside of detention. ICE wouldn't budge on Steve Li's case last month, refusing to release him from detention even after his case got national attention and support from Dreamers around the country. He would likely be in Peru right now if Senator Feinstein hadn't introduced a private bill in the Senate, which put an automatic hold on Li's deportation. In other cases, ICE refused to back down until a case got national media attention and the support of Senators. Mark Farrales is detained right now in California, waiting to be deported. He came to the U.S. when he was 10 after his father was shot by gunmen in the Philippines. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and was working on his doctoral dissertation when he was arrested by ICE. Dreamer Saad Nabeel was deported earlier this year. His attempts to reenter the country have been rejected by the federal government. There have likely been thousands of Dreamers among the nearly 400,000 people that ICE deported in FY 2010, but the great majority of those stories never made it into the papers. Most of those thousands probably didn't even know they were Dreamers. It isn't that Obama's hands are tied in these cases by existing law. ICE has grudgingly exercised favorable discretion in limited cases, as it is the prerogative of the executive to do. Immigration policy is regarded by the courts as an area of foreign policy that happens to take place on domestic soil, and the other two branches of the federal government have ceded incredible discretion to the executive branch to execute the immigration laws as it sees fit. Too often as practicing immigration attorneys, my colleagues and I come up against an impregnable wall of executive discretion that is used to deport our clients. When will we find a president who uses this discretion to stop breaking up families instead of looking for more creative ways to deport people? Barack Obama has not been that president. Obama has the authority not to deport Dreamers, my guess is that he chooses to continue to fight to deport them because he is frightened of the political consequences should he not do so. The only way Obama can continue to praise the DREAM Act in public while deporting Dreamers behind the scenes is if the press doesn't put both sides of the story together. I hope that we as pro-migrant activists, organizers, lawyers, and bloggers can make this story heard so Obama feels real pressure from the other side of this issue for once.

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Dorinda Moreno, Fuerza Mundial / FM Global
Hitec Aztec Communications, Elders of 4 Colors 4 Directions

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[J. Mujica]

No new Dream Act, say GOP lawmakers
Posted: Friday, December 24, 2010 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - Congressional Republicans are pronouncing President
Obama's proposal that the next Congress overhaul the country's
immigration laws as dead before arrival.
In his year-end news conference Wednesday, Obama said his biggest
regret about the recent lame-duck session of Congress was the defeat
of the Dream Act, a measure that offered a path to citizenship for
undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.
"It is heartbreaking," Obama said, as he explained how such immigrants
often realized that they were without legal status only when they
tried to go to college or join the military. "That can't be who we
are. To have our kids, classmates of our children, who are suddenly
under this shadow of fear through no fault of their own. They didn't
break the law - they were kids."
Congressional Republicans said in interviews Thursday that their
concerns about the measure remained strong, and both House and Senate
GOP leaders said they would fight any attempt to legalize any of the
11 million undocumented immigrants in the country before the
administration secured the nation's southern border with Mexico.
"It is pointless to talk about any new immigration bills that grant
amnesty until we secure the border, since such bills will only
encourage more illegal immigration," incoming House Judiciary Chairman
Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said in a prepared statement.
In an interview, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, ranking Republican on the
House immigration subcommittee, accused Obama of playing politics with
immigration and toying with Latino voters.
"It is extraordinarily unlikely that any version of comprehensive
immigration reform that includes amnesty will go through the House of
Representatives," he said.
Obama's call on Congress to pass the Dream Act "polarizes Americans
along the lines of race and ethnicity," King added. "He implies there
is a realistic chance - he knows better, and therefore it makes it a
political statement designed to gin up his base and pit Americans
against Americans."
During the recent contentious congressional debate over the act,
Republicans said the measure would reward violators of the country's
immigration laws and encourage new waves of illegal immigration. They
also said that the measure was lax in allowing some lawbreakers to
gain citizenship, and that the requirement that Dream Act
beneficiaries obtain two years of college education or military
service set the bar too low.
Revising the act to eliminate those issues would not solve the
underlying problem with the measure, said Stephen Miller, a spokesman
for Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who led Senate Republicans in their
opposition to the measure.
"When you're traveling in the wrong direction, modest alterations
don't make a difference," Miller said. "You need to get off the road
and head down a different one. As Senator Sessions has said, the first
thing we need to do is end the massive illegality at the border."
Obama said Wednesday he is open to new measures to improve border
security.
"I think it is absolutely appropriate for the American people to
expect that we do not have porous borders and anyone can come in here
any time," he said. "But I also think about those kids, and I want to
do right by them."