Why Obama Supporters Are Labeling Him a Hypocrite
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President Barack Obama has posed with "Dreamers" for photographs and invoked the Statue of Liberty's welcoming beacon to immigrants across the world. He's even taken highly publicized executive action to move toward immigration reform, because Congress couldn't pass a law.
But the Obama administration has also been doing something recently that they don't talk about much. They're throwing people out of the U.S.
There won't be a meet-and-greet with the president for these immigrants. Officers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are planning a series of raids in May and June to round up undocumented immigrants and deport them, according to an exclusive Reuters report. It's unclear where the raids will happen, but according to an internal document seen by Reuters, most of the targets are mothers and children, and this isn't the first time.
In January, ICE carried out raids in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina that put 121 people in immigration detention centers. A spokeswoman from ICE told Reuters that immigrants who arrived after Jan. 1, 2014 are priorities in these raids. Many of the unauthorized immigrants who arrived around that time were women and children coming to the U.S. to escape violence in Central America, according to The Guardian. The raids also apply to minors who entered the U.S. without a parent but are now 18.
The American Civil Liberties Union has called ICE immigration raids unconstitutional and racist. Here is part of their statement from the ACLU website.
"The Constitution ensures all people equal protection and fair treatment under the law regardless of their skin color or accent; looking or sounding “foreign” is not enough to justify seizing a person for immigration investigation. Moreover, the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures apply to everyone in this country, regardless of their immigration status."
At the same time, the Obama administration supports the Dream Act. The Dream Act is a much publicized proposed law that would protect adults who came to the U.S. as children from deportation. There are 1.7 million Americans who are not legal citizens, but were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents.
Whitehouse.gov - whitehouse.gov
The executive orders that Obama signed in 2014 protect children of unauthorized immigrants or "Dreamers" who came to the U.S. before 2011 and were younger than 16 when they arrived. The administration's 2014 announcement about the executive orders on the White House website said that deportations would focus on criminals and not on families.
"These actions will help secure the border, prioritize felons, not families, and hold undocumented immigrants accountable by requiring them to pass a criminal background check and pay their fair share of taxes, and modernizes the legal immigration system."
These protections don't apply to the parents and children subject to ICE raids in 2016. Instead, it seems to be a tale of two Obamas. The one who stands with unauthorized immigrant families and then the one who makes them leave.
"We didn’t raise the Statue of Liberty with her back to the world, we did it with her light shining as a beacon to the world. And whether we were Irish or Italians or Germans crossing the Atlantic, or Japanese or Chinese crossing the Pacific; whether we crossed the Rio Grande or flew here from all over the world — generations of immigrants have made this country into what it is. It’s what makes us special."— President Obama, November 21, 2014
