What’s not to understand?
The history of non-enforcement actions in the Obama Administration speaks for itself. Since taking office in 2009, the Obama Administration has systematically gutted effective immigration enforcement policies, moved aggressively against state and local governments that attempt to enforce immigration laws, and stretched the concept of “prosecutorial discretion” to a point where it has rendered many immigration laws meaningless. See President Obama’s Record of Dismantling Immigration Enforcement.
Then, at the urging of the open borders lobby, DHS in early 2011 began to implement formal measures to relax the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws through a series of memos issued by ICE Director John Morton. Together, these memos constitute nothing less than the granting of administrative amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens currently in the United States. See The Morton Memos.
As head of DHS, Secretary Johnson should ask all law enforcement officers in DHS about immigration, and actually listen to what they have to say. The heads of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Union have spoken out about the lack of enforcement at DHS:
- The USCIS union president said the agency has become an “approval machine” whereby 99.5% of applicants are granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) with a rubber stamp and without adequately conducting background checks.
- The ICE union leader declared that agents are “prohibited from enforcing immigration violations and document fraud and from cracking down on illegal employment.”
Instead, last week, Secretary Johnson met with 24 individuals who represented illegal alien advocacy groups, cheap labor lobbyists, and other outspoken opponents of immigration enforcement. If these 24 invited guests are the individuals invited to influence immigration policy by the Obama Administration, it doesn’t take a genius to understand what direction immigration enforcement is going.