A naturalization ceremony for military families has become a Fourth of July tradition in Barack Obama’s White House. “This is one of my favorite events to do,” the President said on Friday morning. Twenty-five soldiers, sailors, reservists, veterans, and military spouses became American citizens. They hailed from fifteen different countries, and they were praised, thanked, and welcomed by the President in the East Room. It was a beautiful, anomalous scene of hope and accomplishment in a season of dashed aspirations and bitter strife over immigration.
Everyone believes that our immigration system is broken. And yet a comprehensive reform bill, passed last year by the Senate, is dead. House Speaker John Boehner, spooked (see: Cantor, Eric) by the ferocity of more conservative Republicans, belatedly confirmed its demise last week. He said that it happened because he and his troops didn’t trust the President, although the Speaker’s real trust problem looks to be closer to home.
Obama has vowed to do what he can through executive action to make the existing immigration system “smarter” and more humane. Earlier, political calculation led his Administration to make a show of tough immigration-law enforcement, touting its high deportation numbers to Republicans, hoping that it might help make a comprehensive deal possible. Obviously, those sums came out wrong. Among threatened communities, this approach gained the President nothing but a dire reputation as Deporter-in-Chief.
For Democrats nationally, repairing those relationships, particularly with Latinos, actually began with an executive decision, in 2012, to stop deporting immigrants who were brought to this country as children before 2007 (and who met certain conditions, like not having been convicted of a felony). And there is quite a bit more, at least around the policy edges, that Obama can now do unilaterally. Still, events have continued to outpace and confound his immigration initiatives, regularly exposing the Administration to fire from both sides.
For example, the Administration has drafted local law enforcement into partnerships with federal immigration authorities, thereby alienating governors and mayors, many of them Democrats, who find that these partnerships undermine communities and impede crime fighting. Even gung-ho sheriffs have begun refusing to hold prisoners at the request of immigration authorities, ever since a federal district-court judge in Oregon ruled that a local sheriff was violating the constitutional rights of an immigrant woman by doing so.
But the truly critical test for Obama’s beleaguered immigration policy has come in the terrifying form of the more than fifty thousand unaccompanied children caught streaming across the southern border since last fall. Most of the children come from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador. They have crossed the entire length of Mexico. A number of them are in desperate shape. Nobody knows how many more started north and never arrived. Some of the survivors say that they fled violence and threats at home. Some are searching for relatives. Some have been told by traffickers that the United States will not deport them. (Not true.) The Border Patrol, local shelters, and the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency to which unaccompanied minors must, by law, be entrusted, are reportedly overwhelmed.
The President is calling it “a humanitarian crisis.” Last week, he told Congress that he will need more than two billion dollars to deal with the emergency. He has ordered a “surge” of immigration judges and federal prosecutors to the front. Vice-President Biden and Secretary of State John Kerry have met with the leaders of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Biden announced nearly ten million dollars in new aid to the Central American governments to help with the repatriation of their citizens. (Meanwhile, Representative Randy Weber, a freshman Republican from Texas, has introduced legislation to cut off all aid to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as punishment.) The Administration is even launching a media campaign in Central America, seeking to persuade families of the dangers of the journey north. In a spot made for Guatemalan TV, a teen-ager who ignores his mother’s warnings ends up dead in the desert. Hundreds of billboards and thousands of TV and radio announcements will deliver Washington’s message: the human smugglers are lying about the reception that migrants will find in the U.S.
The President’s political opponents are having a field day with this crisis. Texas, which has been dealing with the brunt of the wave of young migrants, happens to have a governor who’s been thinking hard about 2016. Governor Rick Perry can’t decide whether the fiasco at the border displays incompetence or something worse. On ABC on Sunday, he said, “You are either inept or you have some ulterior motive of which you are functioning from.” In June, on Fox News, Perry was more specific, indeed almost intelligible, about his suspicions: “I mean, how do you move that many people from Central America across Mexico and into the United States without there being a fairly coördinated effort?” This is a version of a surprisingly popular theory on the far right: Obama is secretly encouraging an “invasion” of the United States by impoverished Latin Americans in order to build a rock-solid future Democratic Party majority.
The residents of Murietta, California, are getting that message in some form. They turned out in force last week to stop three buses full of women and children who were being taken to a local Border Patrol station for processing. With chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!,” they succeeded in diverting the buses to another town. There was fierce talk at a town meeting about children carrying diseases. Church leaders in Dallas took the opposite tack. They sent a county judge, a Baptist preacher, and a state senator to the border to check out the conditions in which the young migrants—who look more like refugees than like invaders—are being detained. Then they resolved to house two thousand migrants back home in Dallas while they await the dispositions of their cases.
The most disturbing part of the Administration’s response to the crisis at the border has been a suggestion by the President that, in order to fast-track deportations of young people from Central America, he might seek changes to a 2008 law meant to protect the rights and the welfare of trafficked children. Yes, there are a great many children, and the political optics are terrible for Obama. And yes, many of the newly arrived children will probably end up being deported. But others may have a valid claim to asylum—they come, after all, from some of the most violent societies in the world. All of them have a right to counsel and to a fair hearing. It’s called due process.
Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters
