Obama deportation “reform” faces fight within

The mood among many Latino activists these days is that one of the reasons they are “disappointed” with President Barack Obama is because he is continuing immigration policies held over from the George Bush days.

All too often, an angry activist will engage in a rant about how Obama is deporting more people than Jorge Bush himself ever did.

WHICH IS WHY I found a pair of stories published Friday in the Washington Post to be interesting.

The Post reports that Obama wants to move the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the direction of reducing the number of people it keeps in custody while they await deportation proceedings. The newspaper also published a separate story about how disgusted many ICE staffers are with the direction they think their agency is being taken by the Obama administration.

It seems like this is becoming yet another instance where Obama can’t win, no matter what he does.

The activists (many of whom voted for him) think he isn’t doing enough to help their cause, while the federal officials (some of whom probably didn’t vote for him) think he’s going too far with trying to offer help to the growing Latino population.

AS OBAMA SEES it, what he wants is for the Immigration officials to focus their attention on those people who are among the so-called 12 million living in this country without citizenship or a valid visa who actually pose a threat to our society.

Which as he defines it are those people from other countries who came here to try to cover up their criminal background. Or those people who come here and start engaging in criminal behavior in this country.

What he is not as concerned about are those people who are going out of their way to live their lives in the shadows and are just trying to work as hard as they can so they can earn as much money as possible to try to advance themselves in life.

He sees the situation by which people whom Immigration managed to fluke their way into finding through some raid and are now being incarcerated while awaiting deportation proceedings as being non-threatening to our society.

WHICH MEANS HIS policy desires is something along the line of treating such people the same way we treat those who face charges for minor criminal offenses – they don’t have to post any bond while their cases are pending in the court system.

Now I know that idea bothers those people who want to view these people as criminals just by their very existence north of the Rio Bravo del Norte/Rio Grande. Even though fact is that a visa violation is a civil offense, not criminal.

Which means that they have done something that is even more minor than many of the drug-related and other criminal offenses that people are allowed to walk out of court for without having to post any bond.

It would be a significant step forward if we were to start distinguishing among the individuals who face immigration violations, rather than trying to lump them into one terrifying mass.

INSOFAR AS THE idea that the Immigration staffers don’t approve, it does not surprise me.

I have been a reporter-type person for a long-enough time period to know there often is a difference of thought between the people who run government agencies (who are appointed by the chief executive who won the most recent election) and the staffers who operate the departments within an agency – and who often can recite the number of administrations under which they worked.

They usually think more in terms of the procedural moves, instead of worrying about the ideology inspired by the work they do. Of course, it also can create people who can’t see the big picture beyond their agency, because they get caught up in its minutia.

But it seems, according to the Washington Post, that we have an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that was created during the Bush years (to replace the old Immigration and Naturalization Service) to think in terms of removing people from this country out of a sense that they imposed a threat to national security.

NOW THAT THEY'RE being told that keeping some of those visa violators incarcerated in jails across the country while they await their deportation hearings is somehow flawed has become a challenge to the way they go about their jobs.

Could this be evidence that Obama is somehow coming to his senses and realizing which side is more likely to support him in the future (particularly the U.S. citizen ethnic brethren of those visa violators)?

I’m not convinced that these actions will appease the Latino activists and others with an interest in serious immigration reform.

But it will be interesting to realize that people who theoretically are our opposition also are upset with Obama because they think he’s being too nice to us.

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