President Barack Obama Makes Last Pitch For Immigration Reform Before Legislation Is In Senate

In his weekly presidential address over the weekend, President Barack Obama made his last pitch for the immigration reform bill before the legislation goes to a vote in the Senate on Tuesday. In it, Obama defended the bill as a compromise which might not satisfy everyone but which would "modernize" the nation's immigration system, saying it would live up to the United States' traditions as "a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants". The speech came amid mounting opposition to his administration's deportation policy from immigrant advocacy groups who demand that the president issue an order to stop deportations, which in 2012 hit a record 400,000. The Huffington Post reported in January that at the current rate, 2 million undocumented immigrants would be deported by 2014, more than the total number occurring before 1997.

On Friday, as Obama arrived in Los Angeles as part of a California fundraising trip, some 200 protestors converged on a street corner in Santa Monica, waving signs with the president's image and the words "Deporter in Chief", according to La Opinión. Pablo Alvarado, the executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network - the group which organized the protest - said in a statement that "as the president eats his lunch, 1,400 more people will be being deported" adding that the president had the power to "stop that suffering" with just a stroke of the pen.

"The president must cease policies and dishonest rhetoric that equate immigrants with criminals. He knows full well that it is our families and loved ones he is profiling, criminalizing, and deporting," Alvarado said. "The immigration debate is not one between Democrats and Republicans. It is a debate of fear versus courage."

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In May, during the president's fundraising visit to Chicago, a dozen protestors organized by National People's Action - a network of grassroots organizations - were arrested as they linked arms and laid in the street outside of the Chicago Hilton, blocking traffic there. One of the protestors, Rigo Cadilla, told CBS, "It doesn't make sense to waste resources, and to waste the taxpayers' money on deporting people that will eventually qualify under the comprehensive immigration reform proposals that the Senate and the House want to pass."

The analysis cited by the Huffington Post in its January article, a blog post from sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza, indicated that the number of deportees rose sharply after a change in laws in 1996, from 70,000 to 114,000 in 1997. But numbers stayed fairly steady from 1998 to 2003, when the creation of the Department of Homeland Security - and subsequent surge in funding for immigration law enforcement - triggered the ongoing rise in deportation numbers.