“Deporter in Chief” may have unintended consequences

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco

You may want to call it an unintended consequence.

When national Latino advocacy organizations shifted from pressuring the Republican party on immigration issues, to pressing President Obama for his high number of deportations, it didn’t move Obama. Deportations of undocumented immigrants continue a record pace – soon to reach 2 million during the Obama administration.

Republicans in Congress, on the other hand, have seized the opportunity to flank the President on the immigration issue. They’re debating two measures that are designed to prevent the President from issuing executive orders to ease deportations or move unilaterally on immigration. One is called the “Faithful Execution of the Law Act.” According to the Washington Post, the act

would require all federal officials who implement policy to report to Congress on any reason for non-enforcement.

The other, called the “ENFORCE the Law Act,” would

expedite lawsuits against the Executive Branch for failing to execute the laws.

Theatrical nonsense. The more rational side of the GOP knows that measures like the ones mentioned above can be counter-productive, unless they are actually enacted. If not enacted, the GOP ends up looking like a horde of radical reactionaries (to everyone except the radical reactionary base).

On the other hand, no one is really expecting the President to stop deportations altogether. What the Latino organizations want is for Obama to use his prosecutorial discretion to ease them a bit, to extend the Morton Memorandum of 2010 to include a wider range of cases.

Calling Obama a deporter-in-chief is more a goad than a nudge, the goaders understand the limits of the President’s executive powers, and they’re trying to push Obama to the limits of those powers.

The GOP is flanking, trying to cut the President off before he has a chance to think of flirting with his limits.

Is all this unintended? That would be akin to saying it’s a big oops. And nothing could be further from reality.

As things now stand, the president is as likely to expand the Morton cases as the GOP is to pass their flanking maneuvers. But that’s what we have left: flirting with expansions and empty maneuvers. Any chance of real reform seems to have vanished, and that may have been intended all along.

[Photo by  United States Government Work]

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