Okay... yadayadayada. tired of the "Obama/biden vs
trump" etc.
Here's an NPR report that explains the Obama moves and
presages the coming misery under trump.
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President Trump wants to deport a lot of people this
weekend. “You know what? They came in illegally. They
have to go out,” he told reporters Friday as he
confirmed that planned immigration raids would go ahead
in certain cities starting this weekend.
That’s triggered a national outcry and anxiety in
immigrant communities.
But immigration advocacy groups criticized then-
President Barack Obama as the “deporter in chief”
during his bid for reelection in 2012. It’s a
perception that former Vice President Joe Biden will
have to answer for as he campaigns to carry on Obama’s
legacy.
The issue is complicated. The Bush administration moved
toward removing people from the country with a court
order. What’s more commonly known as deportation is
referred to now by the government as a “removal.”
This sparked increased criticism from immigrant rights
organizations. In previous administrations, far more
people attempted to enter the country, and far more
were turned away, often without a hearing before an
immigration judge. That procedure used to be known as a
“voluntary departure” but is now called a “return” by
the government.
They all have the effect of a deportation, but there
are more legal consequences for a removal than for a
return. In totality, President George W. Bush deported
even more people than Obama – and President Bill
Clinton deported more than Bush.
According to an analysis by the Migration Policy
Institute, more than 12 million people were “deported”
– either removed or returned – from the US during the
Clinton administration. More than 10 million were
removed or returned during the Bush administration. Far
fewer – more than 5 million – were removed or returned
during the Obama administration.
Those numbers alone don’t tell the whole story, though,
according to Obama administration officials.
“A straight numbers-by-numbers comparison doesn’t
provide an accurate picture of what was going on in the
administration,” Cecilia Muñoz, who was a top domestic
policy adviser to Obama and is now with the left-
leaning New America Foundation, said in a phone
interview.
She argues that Obama prioritized deporting people
convicted of serious crimes and recent arrivals who had
no criminal records.
“If you’re not targeting and focused on people who
recently arrived, then the border is effectively open,”
Muñoz said, adding: “It is more humane to be removing
people who have been here two weeks than it is to be
removing people who have been here for 20 years and
have families.”
Trump, by contrast, she said, has rejected the policy
of focusing on new arrivals and criminals and instead
wants to deport as many people as possible.
It’s impossible to ignore his rhetoric. He infamously
called some Mexican immigrants “rapists,” and focused
his presidency around the idea that he would build a
wall, get tough with Mexico and deport as many
undocumented immigrants as possible.
Trump’s planned raids come after years of claims that
American citizens are harmed by the presence of
undocumented migrants – from inviting crime victims to
the State of the Union address to his recent effort to
add a citizenship question to the census.
Obama used executive action to temporarily give
protected status to undocumented people who arrived in
the US as children, and curbed deportations from the
interior states of the country. His focus, particularly
toward the end of his administration, was on quick
“returns” of new arrivals at the border who were
perceived to have had fewer ties in the US – though
that, controversially, included the same types of
Central American migrants whose arrival has swamped the
border this year.
The libertarian Cato Institute crunched the data and
demonstrated that deportations from the interior of the
country – meaning away from the border, so, people who
have likely been in the country longer – were on the
downswing during most of the Obama administration.
Trump has sought to end Obama’s program shielding
undocumented young people from deportation and has
reversed the trend on internal deportations as he’s
sought to remove more people, including those who have
been in the country a long time.
However, Trump still has not reached anywhere near the
level of interior removals as the early Obama
administration, according to Cato’s analysis of data
through 2018.
That has created a headache for Biden, who is now
paying a political price for that Obama record. His
campaign office in Philadelphia was briefly occupied
and six immigration rights activists were arrested
Wednesday. He’s been confronted on the campaign trail.
He didn’t mention Obama’s record on deportations when
he laid out an immigration policy in a meeting with the
Miami Herald in June.
At the second night of the Democratic primary debate in
June, Biden said there’s no comparison between Trump’s
and Obama’s records.
“President Obama, I think, did a heck of a job. To
compare him to what this guy’s doing is absolutely – I
find close to immoral,” he said.
Muñoz argued it is Trump’s lack of priorities about who
to deport that is causing chaos in immigrant
communities.
“People are in terror,” she said. “They’re scared of
sending their children to school. That is a very, very
different dynamic. There are no enforcement priorities
in the Trump administration. That’s the point. In the
Obama administration there were clear priorities.”
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