The Obama administration has quieted down its immigration enforcement over the past couple of years. But the administration is starting 2016 with a bang: with a nationwide wave of immigration raids.
In late December, the Washington Post broke the news that the administration was finalizing a plan to find and deport Central American families who came to the US in the past couple of years but have been ordered to leave by a judge. The government didn’t waste much time. Raids started in the Atlanta area on the morning of Saturday, January 2. At least 11 families were detained, according to the Los Angeles Times. And the raids are expected to continue.
The administration’s motivations are complicated. The plan is in part a response to a new surge of children and families into the US from Central America, after a year-long lull. But it’s also a continuation of the 2014 border crisis, which created deep political frustrations with the Obama administration on the left and right that still haven’t been resolved. Even before the plan was leaked to the public, it was extremely controversial within the Obama administration (which is typically unified on immigration policy), and may be a last-ditch bid to keep the Supreme Court on its side. It’s getting tremendous heat from immigrant rights activists. And it’s almost certainly going to become a problem for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
What the Obama administration is actually doing, in fewer than 200 words
Since the beginning of 2014, about 100,000 families (mostly mothers with children) have arrived in the US from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Most of them have tried to get asylum in the US — these are among the most violent countries in the world, and many of them are being targeted by gangs.
While some of these families have been granted asylum, many have not — either because they’ve made their case in immigration court and lost or because they simply didn’t show up for their scheduled hearing before a judge. Some families (as many as 15,000) have stayed in the country after being ordered to leave.
The Obama administration has launched a big effort to deport those families to begin 2016. And it’s raiding residential neighborhoods to find and arrest the families — a tactic that a lot of immigrants and immigration advocates have traumatic associations with.
The raids are partly a reaction to a new spike of Central American children and families in the US
The “border crisis” basically ended in late summer and early fall of 2014, when the number of children and families entering the US dropped precipitously — thanks largely to the efforts of the Mexican government, which (with significant US assistance) caught many Central American children and families before they could get to the US. Public attention moved on, and the issue kind of drifted to the sidelines.
But as 2015 drew to a close, there was another spike. In some ways, this spike is even more alarming than the 2014 one — that “crisis” happened during a time of year that’s typically a high season for migration to the US from Latin America, while this is happening in the middle of winter, typically a slow time for migrations everywhere. The Obama administration’s reaction to the new wave of Central American families appears to be to step up deportations of the last wave.
There is a policy rationale for this: Government officials consistently said last year that the best way to deter children and families from making the dangerous trip from Central America to the US was to demonstrate that people who made the trip wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the US. But this rationale only makes sense if people shouldn’t leave their home countries and try to come to the US — in other words, if they’re not really legitimate asylum seekers in fear for their lives, but people trying to take advantage of the US immigration system to come here.
Is that true of the people trying to come to the US now? Border Patrol agents think so: They’re circulating reports that most of the newcomers from Central America say they’re coming to the US because they think they can get legal status here, not because they’re afraid for their lives. But there’s a reason Border Patrol agents aren’t in charge of evaluating asylum claims; they can be too dismissive of legitimate danger. And there is evidence that the “Northern Triangle” countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are legitimately dangerous — even more so than they’ve been in the past.
The families who have been caught in raids and could be deported have had a chance to receive asylum from an immigration judge, and have been ordered to leave the US instead. That means they don’t automatically get another hearing before a judge before being deported. But there’s an irony in the fact that they could be deported because of a new wave of entries into the US. If the new wave of entries is because Central America is getting more dangerous, the families denied asylum will be deported to countries where their lives could be more threatened than when they left.
This is particularly upsetting to immigration advocates, many of whom feel that many of these families shouldn’t have been denied asylum to begin with — and that the administration has mistreated them from the very beginning.
The plan is renewing buried feelings from the 2014 “border crisis” — which sowed distrust of the Obama administration on both the right and left
While the border crisis had national attention, the Obama administration struggled mightily to find a policy response that would please its critics on the right and left. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t succeed.
