US News & World Report
By Lauren Fox
February 25, 2014
For
nine days, Jose Valdez has sat outside the the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement headquarters in Phoenix, hungry but resolved. Today, he sits
wearing a red T-shirt
that reads “not one more deportation” in Spanish. His black hair is
slicked back and his left hand is folded over his right, his watch
around his wrist to keep track of the time he has lost.
“My only preparation for the fast was thinking of my son in jail and thinking there will be an end to this,” Valdez says.
Valdez
and five other fasting activists are part of a growing number of
immigrants around the country who are taking dramatic steps to call on
President Barack Obama to
halt deportations. If Congress won’t act, the Latino community expects
the Democratic president they helped elect to do more. For Valdez, it is
about more than just the deportation of his son, Jaime Arturo Valdez
Reyes, who was apprehended a year ago for driving
drunk and placed in deportation proceedings. Valdez says he already
lost another son to deportation – a son who was killed when he was sent
back to Mexico – and he knows too many families in his shoes.
Desperate,
frustrated and no longer willing to wait, Latinos are beginning to
distance themselves from Democrats and refocus their attention and
attacks on a president
who can act unilaterally from the White House, instead of on a Congress
stymied by gridlock.
Across
the country, immigrant communities are fervidly calling on Obama to
halt deportations as they realize Congress isn’t likely to act in 2014,
ahead of the midterm
elections. Activists say demonstrations like the one in Phoenix are
expected to pop up around the nation: Last week, protesters from the
United Methodist Church and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network
were arrested outside the north gate of the White
House. United We Dream, an immigration advocacy group, says it has
begun working to get out the vote in states like Texas and Nevada for
any lawmaker, Democrat or Republican, who has taken direct action to
push immigration reform through Congress this year.
“The
more the Congress refuses to move, the more the administration is going
to see action from us,” says Maria Fernanda Cabello, an organizer for
United We Dream.
Immigrants
in the Latino community are demanding more from a president and a party
that has already taken bigger steps toward immigration reform than many
of their Republican
colleagues in the House of Representatives. In June 2012, the president
announced a program that has stopped the deportation of hundreds of
thousands of young people who had entered the U.S. illegally as children. Obama also has delivered countless speeches
touting the importance of immigrants to the fabric of the economy, and
in November, he promised a group of fasting immigrants on the National
Mall that reform was on its way.
But speeches and promises are no longer enough.
Overshadowing
Obama’s progress, activists say, is his administration’s aggressive
deportation rate, which has outpaced many prior administrations. The
most recent records
show 1.9 million immigrants have been removed from the country since
Obama became president. The administration maintains it prioritizes the
removal of criminals before it goes after immigrants simply living and
working in the U.S. without permission.
“There
is a new emerging consensus that the president can do more,” says Chris
Newman, the legal director at the National Day Laborer Organizing
Network, a group advocating
to halt deportations. “There is now a clear consensus that we cannot
just accept the Democratic Party seeking advantage from an intractable
status quo.”
Politically,
Republicans look to gain the most from immigration reform. With that
off the table, the GOP could begin courting Latino voters with their
economic message.
That could mean a smaller share of Latino votes for Democrats, and some
are accusing the president of sitting back as a way to perpetuate the
status quo.
“It
is undeniable that immigration reform has been held hostage by a
xenophobic, paranoid and nativist wing of the Republican Party. The
question is whether that fact
is something Democrats are willing to resign themselves to in an effort
to exploit it politically,” says Newman.
When
it comes to halting deportations, Obama has said his hands are tied,
and there is nothing more he can do to ease the pain of immigrant
communities who say their families
are being torn apart.
“The
easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by
violating our laws,” Obama told a heckler during an immigration speech
in California in November.
Yet
legal experts challenge the president’s interpretation of those laws.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law at Cornell Law
School, says that the executive
branch has wider prosecutorial discretion than the White House is
letting on. The problem, he argues, isn’t that Obama can’t stop
deportations. It’s the simple fact that doing so is a political risk,
and one the president doesn’t want to take.
“He
has wide legal authority, but you have to balance that against the will
of the people and politically what you can get through Congress if you
push your executive
authority too far,” Yale-Loehr says.
Pressure
from immigrant communities, which have overwhelmingly supported
Democrats in the past, puts the Obama administration in a tight spot. If
the president ignores
immigrants’ requests, he could lose electoral support. In the midterm
elections, Democrats could see Latino voters stay home in places like
Florida and Colorado, where their votes could be the difference between a
Republican or Democrat winning a seat in Congress.
Yet, if Obama does act, he could jeopardize his ability to negotiate on
a comprehensive immigration package down the road in 2015, after
Republicans likely have maintained control of the House and perhaps even
taken back the Senate.
If
Obama charges ahead without Congress, Republican attacks saying the
president “does not enforce the laws on the books” could be validated.
If the president stops deportations
now, that gives Republicans more ammunition, more proof and more
evidence to drag their feet on comprehensive reform, some Republican
lawmakers say.
“If
the president halts deportations, he loses trust,” says Sen. John
McCain, R-Ariz. “It contributes to the opponents of immigration reform
who say that the president
doesn’t want to enforce the law.”
But
if Obama does nothing, activists say it’s a guarantee that more
families – like that of Valdez – will continue to be torn apart.
