Homeland Security Head Said To Be Considering Expansion Of Deportation Protections

With outcry mounting and no legislative solution in sight, the Obama administration isn’t making any promises on unilateral action to protect more immigrants from deportation. But as Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Jeh Johnson carries out a review of the agency’s enforcement policies, there are signs that some kind of widening of protections could be in order. After a closed-door meeting on Wednesday between Johnson and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, three lawmakers present for it told the Washington Post they were pleased with what they’d heard.

“My impression was that he is going to change policies to cut the number of deportations, but that the number is not going to be where we would like it to be,” one lawmaker who remained anonymous told the paper. “I took away that he’s going to revamp the policy.” The source said that Johnson “did not rule anything out”, adding that he thought “there are going to be some intermediate steps coming.” And Johnson himself told reporters at a press conference after the meeting that he had “an open mind about a lot of this” and that he had “learned a lot from the submissions they have made.”

The Caucus sent a memo to Johnson last week with a long list of recommendations on how to improve immigration-enforcement policy and extend deportation protections “within the purvey of the law with the goal of family unity”. The recommendations include suspending or even doing away with the deportations of the estimated 8 million undocumented immigrants who would quality for legal status under the bipartisan bill passed by the Senate last year but stalled in the House.