Last week I reported that the administration had told immigration activists and sympathetic law enforcement officials that it would refuse the Senate's request to set up a formal system for applying for "deferred action" in order to avoid deporting undocumented immigrants who would be eligible under the DREAM Act. The administration's position is that changes to immigration policy have to be legislative rather than administrative.
Any attempt to set up such a process would elicit screams of "amnesty" from conservative corners, but anecdotal evidence suggested the administration might have been more generous in granting deferred action than it might seem. The pro-immigration reform group America's Voice, building off reporting from La Opinión, gives us a look at the numbers, which show Obama has granted a record low number of deferrals:
This chart should be viewed in the context of the record high deportation numbers the administration has racked up in the past few years. Obama has been "tougher" on immigration than his Republican predecessor, and made less progress on facilitating comprehensive immigration reform, even though pursuing strict enforcement was supposed to free up political space for some kind of compromise.
This is largely a partisan phenomenon--the actual policies Obama has pursued are irrelevant to the political discourse because nothing the president does on immigration would make Republicans willing to cooperate on immigration reform.
