President Obama is facing a major hurdle in trying to get
his immigration rewrite through the House: Members of Congress just don’t trust
him.
Republicans, who control a majority of seats in the House,
doubt Obama will faithfully enforce new immigration laws, and they point to his
repeated violations of existing law as evidence. Even reform champions such as
Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) concede that “it’s difficult to find a good answer” to
this charge.
Opponents are quick to cite the Obama administration’s
selective enforcement of Obamacare, along with its tendency to bypass Congress
via executive order, as evidence that the president would readily disregard
aspects of an immigration-reform law he doesn’t like, such as provisions to
secure the border.
Republicans can also point to myriad examples of the Obama
administration’s selective enforcement of existing immigration laws. The list
is longer than even some GOP opponents of comprehensive reform realize.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), an ally of House opponents
of a new immigration bill, has compiled an exhaustive timeline of the
administration’s efforts to “dismantle immigration enforcement” since January
2009, when the Department of Homeland Security announced the first in a series
of delays to the deadline by which federal contractors were supposed to have
implemented an employment-verification (E-verify) system.
Since 2009, the Obama administration has repeatedly invoked
executive authority to limit the ability of Immigrations and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) agents to follow the law, and has severely restricted their
ability to initiate deportations proceedings, even against illegal immigrants
who have been arrested on felony charges.
For years the administration has directed government
attorneys to dismiss thousands of deportation cases against illegal immigrants.
The White House has also pressed employees of United States Citizenship and
Immigration Services (USCIS) to speed up approval of applications.
As early as July 2010, the White House began contemplating
“Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” or ways that
Obama could achieve policy outcomes absent action from Congress. In many
instances, it has followed through on these suggested “alternatives,” most
notably in June 2012, when the administration unilaterally implemented portions
of the DREAM Act, legislation that had repeatedly failed to pass Congress.
Since then, the administration has granted legal status to more than 500,000
applicants, while rejecting fewer than 15,000.
Obama’s Justice Department has pursued legal action against
states and municipalities that set out to do local enforcement of immigration
laws, while declining to take action against those states that ignore
immigration laws or prevent federal agents from enforcing them.
The Obama administration has, by its own admission,
neglected to enforce federal laws barring the admission of immigrants likely to
become a “public charge,” defined as an individual who is “primarily dependent
on the government for subsistence, as demonstrated by either the receipt of
public cash assistance for income maintenance, or institutionalization for
long-term care at government expense.”
House Republicans say border security must be addressed
before any other aspects of immigration reform are considered, and the Obama
administration’s attitude on border security has been nonchalant at best.
Following a February 2013 report from the Government
Accountability Office, the administration was forced to admit that it lacked
any official metric by which to assess the security of the Southern border,
which ran afoul of legal mandates established in 2006. According to the New
York Times, administration officials said “they had resisted producing a single
measure to assess the border because the president did not want any hurdles
placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country
illegally.”
Most recently, in December 2013, a federal judge in Texas
accused the administration of actively abetting the trafficking of illegal
immigrants along the border, a practice the judge described as “dangerous and
unconscionable.”
Source:http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370446/obamas-immigration-non-enforcement-actions-andrew-stiles By Andrew Stiles, February
6, 2014 Read the full report
[PDF<http://c9.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/enforcement_action.pdf>].
<http://c9.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/enforcement_action.pdf> to
view the detailed timeline of administrative non-enforcement directives
compiled by Sen. Sessions’ office]
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