DREAM Act student activists (Jeff Topping/REUTERS)
American DREAMers might be able to rest a little easier following the quiet release of a memo from Obama's immigration chief advising Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials on prioritizing which undocumented immigrants to deport. Mother Jones' Suzy Khimm has the
story.
Since taking office, Obama has prioritized the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes and threaten public safety. Now his administration has moved to ensure that federal immigration agents and attorneys are following such guidelines in the field—while empowering them to take their focus off certain undocumented immigrants who meet a host of criteria. In a June 17 memo to ICE employees, the agency’s director, John Morton, outlined 19 factors that could warrant the use of "prosecutorial discretion" and prevent certain immigrants from being deported, on a case-by-case basis.
According to the memo, there is a range of issues that federal agents, attorneys, and other officials should consider in deciding whether to pursue deportation. They include: whether the person is a military veteran; has made "contributions to the community"; acts as a caretaker of the infirm or disabled; or is very young, very old, pregnant, or nursing.
Morton's order also instructs federal officials to weigh the circumstances of an undocumented immigrant's arrival in the US—especially if he or she came as a young child—and whether the individual graduated from high school or college, or is currently pursuing higher education. The memo explicitly states that no group of immigrants is categorically excluded from deportation. So there’s no get-out-of-deportation-free card....
"It's a paradigm shift…it's the first memo I've seen by an ICE director written in plain English so that a field officer and trial attorney can understand it," says David Leopold, an immigration attorney and president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "What he's really saying is, look at the people you run across in the scope of your enforcement work as human beings, not merely as statistics and targets—have they developed ties, have they added to the social fabric and culture, do they have children that depend on them? I applaud him for that."
A humane deportation policy. Go figure. It's not without its problems, of course. Harping from conservative critics is one of them, but far more important is dissent within ICE. "On Thursday, the National ICE Council, a union representing 7,600 ICE employees issued a new memo, calling it a 'law enforcement nightmare' and accusing the Obama administration of going out of its way to 'protec[t] foreign nationals illegally in the US.'" The administration counters that the "directive clearly states that the exercise of discretion is inappropriate in cases involving threats to public safety, national security and other agency priorities." If immigration agents can't determine the difference between a criminal and a college student, the agency has more trouble on its hands than implementing this policy.
This directive still leaves DREAMers in legal limbo. It's not a path to citizenship, but can give them more breathing room. It's not an answer to passage of the DREAM Act or comprehensive immigration reform, but it's a welcome move from President Obama.