Did The White House Use Cecilia Muñoz?

So this is how it breaks down.

On August 16, Cecilia Muñoz, the White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote a post in which she defended President Barack Obama’s Secure Communities program, which had been largely criticized for targeting non-criminal aliens and basically creating fear in Latino communities. This is after the Obama Administration made it mandatory for states who had opted out, such as New York, to participate, basically saying “you will deport who we want you to deport.”

A few days later, August 18, the administration totally reversed course, saying that the government would review 300,000 pending deportations, focus only on criminals and even let DREAMers stay. And not only did they say it, but they meant it, and the reviews have already begun. Mind you, this only came after really intense protest, action and work from activists across the country.

Then Muñoz went onto Twitter to answer questions about the reversed policy she had defended two days prior.

So did the White House throw Muñoz under the bus? Did she even know the policy she was defending — which ran counter to what she’d said in her previous immigration reform work: “Hispanic Americans, immigrants and natives, continue to suffer abuse in the name of immigration enforcement” — would be reversed in a few days? What’s the story?

We’ll probably have to wait for those post-administration memoirs to get all the different versions, and since we reached out to the White House to speak to her, it became clear they aren’t really too excited to have her paraded in front of the press.

Angelo Falcón of the National Institute for Latino Policy sent out this note this week:

Some found her defense of this program so offensive that calls for her to apologize and resign began to circulate. Her intervention has intensified the debate over this program (also read this). At the same time, President Obama’s approval rating among Latinos has hit an all-time low, attributable largely to his record on immigration, while he aggressively courts the Latino vote.

But it is clear that Cecilia Muñoz is not the issue here, it is the positions and “strategy” of President Obama. Her record as an immigrant advocate is impeccable and we should rather have her inside the White House than out of it (we’ve got plenty of advocates on the outside already). So let’s not personalize this disagreement and let’s focus on the issues and facts, as most are doing.

Ms. Muñoz’s arguments try to paper over the problems of a program that is, on balance, harmful to the Latino community and although she clearly knows better (I think), she threw her credibility behind a deeply flawed policy to understandably defend her boss, the President, and his broader long-term vision. And, if you didn’t know, she’s was a recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant in 2000 for “critically engaging the issue of immigration.” She’s a genius! I say, stay critical, very critical, but give this longstanding Latino community advocate the benefit of the doubt . . . at least until November 6,2012.

Ultimately, none of us will know the whole story until, as I said, we get the juicy chisme from those insider-ey memoirs. In the meantime, I’m happy and I know many others are, too, that the Obama Administration is living up to the promises of immigration reform, albeit one small step at a time.