Don’t be deceived. President Barack Obama has no intention to send back the latest flood of illegal aliens. He only wants you to think that he will.
With his usual clever word choice and fawning media, President Obama is getting headlines that he wants, hoping to lessen the political heat on him and fellow Democrats. His goal is to mislead Americans into thinking he will change course, get tough and start deporting the flood of minors and others who are storming across America’s southern border.
Obama said in a Thursday interview that his message to Central America is this: “Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back.”
But he never addressed the all-important point of when. Under the pace of Obama’s policies, it would take decades, if ever. The interviewer, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, immediately changed the subject instead of asking about when.
But Friday morning, thanks to that softball interview, Obama got the headlines he wanted, such as this one on the Drudge Report: “REVERSES POLICY: Don’t Send Your Children Unaccompanied.”
But there is no such reversal. Only a clever interview with a friendly reporter.
Obama is pulling one of his usual word tricks, trying to defuse intense public outrage. There are no reports that any meaningful numbers of the recent arrivals have yet been sent back. Most will end up here permanently. Even before they arrived, we had a backlog of 360,000 people clogging the deportation system thanks to years of Obama’s extreme slow-motion approach.
The president’s stunt is to claim that the flood of minors (moer than 52,000 since October, with tens of thousands more still arriving) will be deported, without addressing when. This week, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, noted that fewer than 2,000 unaccompanied minors per year have been sent home since 2011. At that rate, it would take 26 years to send back the 52,000 who have arrived since October. All would be middle-aged by then.
But all deportation efforts are useless when people fail to show up for deportation hearings, which is extremely likely for the current flood.
The extra people Obama has dispatched to the border are not assigned to send people back. Instead, their task is to speed up the process of scattering the illegals throughout the country, making their presence less visible and thus a lesser political problem. Obama pretends he cannot speed up the legal process to send back the new arrivals, although immigration experts fervently disagree.
Obama told ABC: “There’s a system in which we’re supposed to process them, take care of them, until we can send them back.” Yet he disregarded legal barriers when he created a system of “deferred action” that lets hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants remain in the U.S. and obtain approval to work. Or when he unilaterally approved revisions to Obamacare and to other federal laws.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies, streamlining processes can include “expedited removal,” which a Border Patrol agent with supervisory approval can order for families, with no judge needed. For asylum claims, the precedent of “Operation Streamline” can make immigration judges available on the spot at the border. Accelerated dockets can be used for “unaccompanied minors.” When they claim to have family in the U.S., their status can be changed and no longer considered “unaccompanied” and their family should be considered for potential deportation if, as is common, they paid smugglers to bring the children here.
Meantime, although clumped temporarily into large centers, the minors (mostly teen-age boys) are being dispersed and scattered throughout the country as quickly as bureaucrats can place them. Usually they’re transported at taxpayer expense around the country to be placed with fellow illegal immigrants, who also are given immunity from arrest.
As many in Congress are warning, the “humanitarian crisis” was generated by the constant promotion of amnesty by President Obama and others, and by Obama’s de facto amnesty policies. Nobody should be deceived by his carefully chosen words. Obama’s actions speak far louder than his words. So do his inactions.
Here is a transcript of aportion of Thursday’s ABC News interview:
Stephanopoulos: You mentioned immigration. There’s a humanitarian crisis on the border. Some of your critics have said you need to speak out more directly to the people of Central America and say, “Don’t come. If you come, you will be deported.”
Obama: We actually — we’ve done that. The problem is that, under current law, once the kids come across the border, there’s a system in which we’re supposed to process them, take care of them, until we can send them back.
Stephanopoulos: Is your message “don’t come?”
Obama: Oh, our message absolutely is, “Don’t send your children unaccompanied on trains or through a bunch of smugglers.” That is our direct message to families in Central America: Do not send your children to the borders. If they do make it, they’ll get sent back. More importantly, they may not make it.
Stephanopoulos: Let’s talk about Iraq.
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