Obama's Flip Flop on Deportations

Recently, President Obama and I had a parting of ways over deporting illegal immigrants.

Not that Obama and I ever saw eye to eye on this issue and many others. In fact, in October 2008, I wrote a column urging Latinos to vote for John McCain to pay back the many years of support that the GOP presidential nominee had shown for their causes and concerns.

In the end, two-thirds of Latinos did a dumb thing. They voted for a candidate who — while he came from Chicago, which is now nearly 30 percent Latino — had a scant record of accomplishments on behalf of Latinos.

Thus, Obama had essentially gotten something for nothing, and that would set the tone for his relationship with the Latino community once he was elected president. He would continue to do what he thought to be in his own best interests, even if it meant going against the interests of Latinos. And then he would lie about it, and try to convince those Latinos who had supported him that he was firmly in their corner.

Nowhere is that more in evidence than in his record and policy on deportations.

I was in the room with other journalists, in the summer of 2008, when the presidential candidate told a gathering of the National Council of La Raza: “When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it.”

When I heard those remarks — as the son of a retired law enforcement officer, and someone who supports deportations — I cringed. Aside from the hyperbole about “nursing mothers torn from their babies,” why have immigration agents in the first place if we’re not going to let them do their jobs — however unpleasant the outcome might be. Illegal immigrants made the choice to come to the United States without permission, or to overstay a visa, and with choices come consequences — for them and their families.

Back then, I might not have agreed with Obama on deportations and other forms of immigration enforcement. But I could respect his views, even if they were to the left of mine. But since becoming president, Obama has turned himself inside out on the issue, and now there is nothing to respect.

In the last two years, the Obama administration has apprehended and deported nearly 800,000 illegal immigrants, a feat that Homeland Security Security Janet Napolitano likes to brag about when combating the perception that the administration is soft on enforcement. ICE still raids businesses and homes, and still breaks up families. But now that the immigration enforcement agency is under his control, Obama apparently no longer has a moral objection to such practices.

For extra credit, the administration also deports U.S. citizens. Consider the decision by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to “deport” Emily Ruiz to Guatemala despite the inconvenient fact that the 4-year-old girl from Brentwood, NY, is a U.S. citizen. Emily traveled with her grandfather to Guatemala. On their way back to New York, their flight was rerouted because of bad weather to Dulles International Airport. The grandfather’s visa was questioned and an old felony popped up for illegal reentry many years ago. So Grandpa was slated for deportation. Emily’s father, Leonel Ruiz — who along with his wife are in the country illegally — insists that he was never given the option of picking up his daughter, only between shipping Emily to a child detention facility or to Guatemala with her grandfather. He chose the latter, and off the little girl went. Emily is now back home thanks, not to the administration, but to the family’s lawyer, who flew to Guatemala to retrieve her.

I said I supported removing illegal immigrants, but I draw the line at expelling U.S. citizens.

What’s troubling is not just that the Obama administration’s policy on immigrant deportations is often egregious and unseemly. It’s that Obama’s approach to the issue is so dishonest that he has trouble owning up to that fact — at least until he is forced to do so.

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos recently forced the issue. In an interview with Ramos, Obama insisted that illegal immigrants who would have been spared by the DREAM Act — which offered legal status in exchange for attending college — are not being deported and the administration is not “going around rounding up students.” A few days later, in another interview with Ramos, Obama admitted that his administration is, in fact, deporting these students because “America is a nation of laws” and the president is “obligated to enforce the law.”

Talk about a role reversal. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? And how does he expect for Latinos to vote for him again — if no one can believe anything he says and if what he says keeps changing from day to day?