So apparently the new hotness in Republican circles is accusing the president of having created a "stealth DREAM Act" in the form of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo that suggests immigration authorities focus on deporting criminals instead of pregnant moms or college students.
This is from the Daily Caller on Friday:
“The factors are extremely broad and very troubling … [it] look like a stealth DREAM Act enforcement through non-enforcement,” said Kobach.
That would be Kris Kobach, one of the authors behind Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant SB 1070 law. It may shock you to know that he's actually a lawyer, because he apparently doesn't know the difference between not deporting someone and offering them a path to citizenship. The DREAM Act would do the former, the ICE memo may result in immigration authorities not prioritizing the deportation of undocumented immigrant veterans or the terminally ill.
In practice, the new memo won't make much of a difference because “ICE isn't deporting people now,” said Jessica Vaughan, an analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies. While pleading limited resources, “they only [deport] individuals with criminal charges,” such as felonies or several misdemeanors, she said.
Well, in practice the memo won't make much of a difference because the administration has been nominally prioritizing the deportation of undocumented immigrants they consider dangerous for some time. But that doesn't mean they "aren't deporting people," in fact the Obama administration is deporting more undocumented immigrants than any president ever, around 400,000 people a year. Not only that, but the opposite of what Vaughan claims is true: Rather than only deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal charges, according to ICE almost half their removals this financial year (121,802 out of 243,821) involved "non-criminal immigration violators."
Basically the issue is that ICE says it only has the resources to deport 400,000 people a year, so it should focus on those who pose the most danger to public safety. Nonwithstanding how that actually works out, the conservative response to this is that because ICE can't magically deport every undocumented immigrant in the country, that amounts to Obama issuing a de-facto amnesty. Maintaining that alternate universe is considerably easier when purported "experts" are willing to just make stuff up or are simply too dumb to read a chart.
