President Barack Obama told Univision on Tuesday that "the day after" a deal on the debt ceiling and government shutdown was reached, he'd turn his attention back to his push for comprehensive immigration reform. On Wednesday, Congress managed a last-minute, short-term solution that funded the government and raised the debt ceiling. That same day, the DREAM Action Coalition - an advocacy group for undocumented youth who grew up mostly in the United States - sent a sharply worded open letter to Obama warning him that neither they nor Latino voters would be "fooled by rhetoric" and urged him to forge a "real legacy of leadership" on immigration reform.
"Dreamers and the American people...especially Latino voters, have heard the same empty words and broken promises before from candidate Barack Obama and President Obama," read the letter, which the DREAM Action Coalition attributed to both itself and "Latino voters". It went on to say, "The President is thinking about immigration in the middle of this fiscal crisis, because the reality is that the government might be shut down, but his administration has ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] open and running, bringing his Administration closer to the 2 million deportations milestone."
Late last week and early this week, demonstrators convened in Tucson and Phoenix to stage a series of protests of deportations, which see an average of about 1,100 people - of whom some 62 percent have no record of convictions, according to ICE data -- flown or bused out of the country per day. Protestors in Tucson chained themselves to deportation buses, putting a temporary halt to Operation Streamline, a 2005 federal migrant-criminalization program in which undocumented immigrants caught trying to cross certain parts of the US-Mexico border automatically see their cases prosecuted, meaning many of them serve time in jail before being deported.
One of the demands made by the DREAM Coalition in its letter was for the president to "organize meeting with DREAMers and families to discuss halting deportations in the event Congress does not act". It also took a swipe at two House Democrats who, in the midst of the government shutdown, introduced a modified version of the Senate's bipartisan bill - the latter a bill which Republicans in the House have rejected. The letter demanded that Obama "NOT follow Leader Pelosi's and Rep. Becerra's strategy to just make immigration a partisan issue to win more seats the next election".
"Your term as President of the United States will one day be over. What will remain and be embedded in history as your legacy, however, is still unsure. The record number of deportations is not only about numbers but also about broken families being separated everyday," the letter said.
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