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This is pretty funny. Republicans are so desperate to paint President Obama as a soft-border friend to the undocumented, they’re trying to redefine the word “deportation.”
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is accusing Obama and his administration of having “fabricated” and “falsified their record to achieve their so-called historic deportation numbers…illegitimately adding over 100,000 removals to their deportation figures for the past two years.”
Smith, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, points out the Obama administration has decided to include removals under a new border security program called the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) in the official deportation statistics beginning in 2011, citing internal documents his committee has recently obtained. He believes this practice is illegitimate because “there are no penalties or bars attached when illegal immigrants are sent back via ATEP and they can simply attempt re-entry,” according to his Aug. 24 statement. The ATEP removals accounted for about 37,000 of the approximately 397,000 immigrants who were deported in 2011, Smith continues. Without them, the deportation numbers for 2011 would actually be lower than 2008′s numbers under Bush.
So what’s the Alien Transfer Exit Program? That’s when border patrols catch undocumented immigrants and send them across the border. More specifically, they send them to border stations hundreds of miles away from their point of entry, in an attempt to break up their contact with a smuggler who would send them across the border again. If caught a second time, the immigrant is sent far into the interior of Mexico, instead of to the border.
But I’m struggling to understand how this constitutes anything other than deportation. The subject, the undocumented immigrant, gets deported, moved from this country into another country. Of course it “counts” as a deportation.
The entire argument is ridiculous. Even if Smith’s ludicrous determinant of what counts as a deportation were true, this would shift President Obama from deporting the most immigrants annually in history to the second-most. What’s the difference? There are net outflows from the US to Mexico among immigrants, mainly because of the economy, but also because of the new vigor of prosecuting deportations. And this, by the way, includes separating families and deporting victims of domestic violence and barring loving couples from living together in the United States and a host of other unwise policies.
So don’t worry, Rep. Smith. The President’s been plenty vigorous when it comes to deportations. Maybe not as much as you, but more than any President in American history, which says at least something.
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American history…… Imagine being a slave and making it to a free state, where your family is located. Then to be declared a “fugitive slave,” and
deportedreturned to your un-rightful owner. Delivered back into servitude of the any master? I guess being deported back to a banana republic, where you are in servitude to the American backed or owned corporations doing business in said banana republic, picking bananas, to be sold in America, is the American way? So much for family and the American dream, for the party of family values, Lamar?Yes, president Obama has deported more undocumented immigrants than any other president. He hasn’t prosecuted one Wall Street banker, one CIA torturer, one government official who lied us into a war. But poor, desperate immigrants? He’s all over them!
So sad….Im a native TXan. Still I wonder who are these people. Our paper had a great story on the San Antonio mayor who will be the Dem. KeyNote speaker. I hope he “knocks it outta the park”, has them on their feet, etc. Really, something to look forward to seeing.
This is classic Obama: dispiriting his supporters without making his opponents any less rabid.
And yet, Obama is projected to get the majority of the Hispanic vote.
A deportation occurs under a judge’s deportation order issued after a hearing.
The republican is correct that these are not deportations. If anything, a deportation involves some element of due process. These “removals” don’t as far as I know. At the same time, deportation has far more severe penalties. if the individual is again found inside the US, it’s a felony.
Obama wants it both ways–he wants to appear sensitive to the problems faced by illegal immigrants, while at the same time throwing them out in an underhanded way while playing some numbers game.
Maybe we could relabel the “removals” and call them “renditions” instead. I’m trying to think up some rationale for that term, with the goal simply to attach a more pejorative term to a very nasty habit.
You mention due process and a judge’s order being necessary for an act of deportation. But suppose when the GOP gets in charge the PTB deem deportation and removal as an administrative, automatic process and then they legislate it out of any court’s jurisdiction? Not beyond the realm of possibility, I’m afraid.