EatLeadCommie
Tommy Elrod
I think all of you missed my point (and the point of that quote). I was saying that it was a myth that in the Obama Administration, ICE officers were forced to leave anyone who wasn't a gang member or violent criminal alone.
The Obama Administration deported more people than Bush and Clinton did. And he deported a lot of people who were not gang members or violent criminals. That said, the administration invested more of its resources on focusing on gang members and violent crimes, I think properly. There are limited resources, and you can't deport everybody.
ELC, you seem to be assuming that the Obama Administration could have deported a lot more people and chose not too. I'm not sure the data really bears that out given the resource constraints. If the Trump administration can remove the same number of gang members and violent criminals, while also increasing the number of non-gang members, etc. then I'm generally ok with that. But I hope that the current "unshackled" approach doesn't burn a bunch of resources on people who aren't causing problems while leaving criminals untouched.
Also, I think it's easy to say that illegal aliens should be removed from the country, but having work on some deportation/asylum cases, it's really sad how dehumanizing our immigration laws are. We're talking about people who have lived in this country for 20+ years, have families here, have lived the American dream, and you're going to pick them up and throw them out when they often did nothing wrong other than come here in the first place (and maybe they came as kids when they didn't even have a choice in the matter).
It's cruel honestly. And I wish more on the right would be sensitive to the actual human element here, rather than just viewing it as a class of illegals who need to be purged from the country.
Sorry for the late response.
I'm telling you from a policy and reality boots on the ground POV that the Obama administration absolutely could have deported more people and chose not to. This was evident early on when they were instructing DHS attorneys to drop cases in court, in front of the IJ, on their court dates. Everything was ready to go, but if they weren't a criminal, we were just dropping it. All that was left was to shackle them up and bus them back, basically. There were articles going back probably 7-8 years in the Houston Chronicle that talked about this.
I know that some asylum cases are rough, although if they're claiming asylum after 20 years of living in the US, it's obviously a bullshit claim. But one thing that struck me as ridiculous that was later changed was the "providing material support for terrorism" disqualifier in asylum cases. AQ could come to your house, hold a gun to your kid's head, and demand water, and if you got them a glass of water, that was deemed material support and tough titty. That was just stupid policy.
I also know somebody who can't be with his family in the US because when he was young he freaked out when apprehended at the border and told the BP officer he was a USC. You can be a rapist or a murderer, but you can't represent yourself as USC because there is no waiver for that. He's fucked, basically. Did I mention that he actually waited 10 years since his last illegal entry to try to come in legally? He thought the 10 year penalty would apply (which it did), but wasn't aware of his statutory bar due to a false claim to US citizenship. He tried to come back illegally a while back but was apprehended again and won't be making another trip. His wife and kids are USCs. That is also stupid.
As far as removing people who have been here 20 years, they know the rules. It doesn't help that the government has given many a unilateral pass for 8 years, thus misleading them, but the amnesties absolutely have to stop and the permissive policies have to as well since they only encourage more illegal immigration. If we were not talking about yet another amnesty and had been deporting people the last 8 years with the same approach that Clinton or Bush took (meaning deporting for all offenses and having some semblance of interior enforcement), we would not find ourselves in the current pickle, and I'd be fine. Instead, we get a blowhard like Trump who is more dogmatic about the issue and people will inevitably get screwed at some point. That doesn't mean the solution is to let them skate another 4-8 years or make them legal. We wouldn't have people freaking out about all these yahoos getting deported who should've been deported years ago.