Only in the Obama administration is the deportation of the fewest illegal immigrants in nearly a decade good news.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson attempted to spin the news Wednesday, pointing to the number of illegal immigrants stopped at the border in fiscal 2015 that ended on Oct. 1 being the lowest since 2006.
“Our investments in border security have led to these results,” he told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s convention in Washington.
However, deportations from the interior of the country are also down, which means there is less emphasis on finding and returning to their country of origin the illegal immigrants who have crossed the border and fanned out across the United States.
Indeed, deportations have declined steadily in the last three years. That’s intentional, the administration has admitted. But it also said its deportation efforts would more narrowly focus on illegal immigrants who pose a national security threat, those who have serious criminal records and those who recently crossed the Mexican border.
That’s not what happened in fiscal 2015, though. Instead, the numbers indicate deportations of criminal illegal immigrants fell to the lowest level since Obama took office.
Ironically, Johnson said the decline can be partly blamed on the greater effort required to track down immigrants and on the reluctance of “sanctuary cities” to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Think about his statement for a moment.
The Obama administration looked the other way as thousands of illegal immigrants streamed over the border and disappeared into the heartland and then claimed the difficulty in finding them is the reason deportation numbers are low.
And the “sanctuary cities” that Johnson said fail to cooperate with federal immigration authorities are the same ones that would have been punished for their failure to cooperate by a proposed bill in Congress that the White House vowed to veto because it “threatens the civil rights of all Americans.”
You just can’t make this stuff up.
As if there were an upside to the numbers he had just discussed, Johnson said on the downside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was seeing a renewed surge of illegal immigrants from Central America similar to the one in 2014 that caught his department so off guard.
In court, his department blamed last year’s surge largely on smugglers who told illegal immigrants they could get them into the U.S. without any problem. But Wednesday, he said the surge occurred because of conditions in Central America.
“It’s because of the poverty and the violence in those countries,” he said, urging more spending there, “and we just simply have to address that.”
Yet, Central American countries, thanks to a bipartisan congressional agreement, will be getting $125 million more in aid in fiscal 2016 – for a total of $675 million, rather than the administration’s request of $1 billion – than they did in fiscal 2015.
Previous targeted efforts such as Plan Columbia, a Clinton-era concept which invested 81 percent of its budget to military and police aid, and the Merida Initiative, a George W. Bush-era plan which expended 78 percent of its budget for law enforcement, were unsuccessful and saw only increases in violence in the places they were trying to help.
By this time, with the war on poverty and public education as prime example, U.S. officials should have learned that throwing more and more money at problems does not solve them.
Johnson also had more good news to report to the supportive group but bad news for those who long to see U.S. laws on illegal immigration upheld: New guidelines will encourage ICE agents to grant humanitarian waivers to illegal immigrants with family members in the U.S. who would suffer “extreme hardship” if they were separated.
The guidelines, seemingly, could allow parents who come to the country illegally to get waivers for their children or for the parents of children already here to get waivers for themselves.
“This is a surreal distortion of the plain language and intent of the law,” Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Times. “It is a flagrant attempt to launder the status of tens of thousands of people who simply are not eligible to be admitted as immigrants.”
Toting up the score, it’s difficult to find anything positive in the latest numbers. The country now has about 11 million illegal immigrants. It deported 231,000 last year, compared to 400,000 annually in the president’s first term, a 42 percent drop. It moved its focus to criminal illegal immigrants but deported fewer of those. And, the cherry on top of the sundae, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has promised to be “less harsh and aggressive” in enforcing immigration laws than Obama.