Obama Administration Directive To ICE Urges Discretion On Deportations Of Undocumented Parents

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers should take into account whether or not an undocumented immigrant is a parent of a minor when they're put in custody, advocates a new policy directive from the Obama administration. The memo offers advice on how to handle a number of specific situations involving undocumented parents. In one example, it directs officers to utilize alternatives to detention when the individual has a clean record and if the child would be left without a caregiver, but stops short of extending a reprieve from deportation procedures.

Nor does the administration's memo move undocumented parents down the list of priorities for the ICE. But its impact will be significant. About 4.5 million US-born children had at least one undocumented immigrant parent in 2010. Some 200,000 parents of US citizen children were deported between 2010 and 2012, and in 2011, there were about 5,100 US children who were living in foster care after their undocumented parents were detained or deported, according to the Applied Research Center.

Brandon Montgomery, an ICE spokesperson, told ABC News that the directive underscores the agency's capacity to "utilize alternatives to detention for these individuals particularly when the detention of a non-criminal alien would result in a child being left without an appropriate parental caregiver". Immigrations and Customs already releases non-violent immigration-law offenders from detention facilities in cases when it deems them not to be a threat to the community, typically with a bracelet or some other sort of tracking mechanism. The new memo designates an ICE officer to act as a special consultant at each of its field offices for cases in which a detainee has minor children. It also suggests that a parent who has been taken into custody should be detained in a facility close to home. And officers will be made to include details about a detainee's family in their case file.

The memo evoked a quick reaction from Republicans who have opposed past directives from the Obama administration and Department of Homeland Security leadership which designates certain undocumented individuals as being of a relatively low priority. "President Obama has once again abused his authority and unilaterally refused to enforce our current immigration laws," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (Va.) said in a statement. "This new directive from the Obama administration also poisons the debate surrounding immigration reform and shows that the administration is not serious about fixing our broken immigration system."

Immigrant advocacy groups, on the other hand, saw the memo as an insufficient remedy for a much more deeply rooted problem. "It is really only addressing the symptoms," Marielena Hincapié, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), told ABC. "The underlying problem, however -- the record number of detentions and deportations, and the number of parents and family that continue to get separated and ripped apart from each other -- is just unacceptable."

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