Save Our State - Is this the beginning of amnesty?

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The Obama administration will block deportations of hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants who had been brought to the country as children, ending a years-long standoff with Hispanic activists who are crucial to the president’s reelection campaign.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano made the announcement in a statement Friday morning.
Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,” Napolitano said. “But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case. Nor are they designed to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or even speak the language. Discretion, which is used in so many other areas, is especially justified here.”

The issue has been a major point of contention between immigration advocates and President Obama. Advocates have spent months urging the president to take executive action to spare many young illegal immigrants from deportation, and until now Obama has insisted that he did not have the authority to do so.

As word spread of the announcement early Friday , the same advocates who have been sparring with the president and his aides began heaping praise on the administration.

Deepak Bhargava, director of the Center for Community Change who had two tense encounters with Obama during 2010, on Friday credited the president with a “bold act to uphold our values and protect our kids.”

“Approximately 1 million young people will have their dreams restored thanks to the principled leadership of President Obama,” Bhargava said.

The new policy drew an immediate rebuke from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a leading GOP critic of Obama’s immigration policies. He charged that the president was playing partisan politics and had committed a “breach of faith with the American people.”

The action “also blatantly ignores the rule of law that is the foundation of our democracy,” Smith said. “This huge policy shift has horrible consequences for unemployed Americans looking for jobs and violates President Obama’s oath to uphold the laws of this land.”

The policy is designed to aid immigrants who would have been affected by the DREAM Act, a Democratic-backed bill that would have put many students and veterans on a path to citizenship but failed to win passage in Congress. The White House had been reluctant to go around Congress to resolve the issue, but began to feel pressure from advocates when a prominent Hispanic Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, began working with activists on a scaled-back version of the bill.

The Republican senator’s overtures to immigrant activists pose a challenge to Obama’s courtship of the Hispanic vote.

Early on, Rubio had softer immigration line
Full coverage: Immigration in the United States
“Our nation’s immigration laws must be enforced in a firm and sensible manner,” Napolitano said. “But they are not designed to be blindly enforced without consideration given to the individual circumstances of each case. Nor are they designed to remove productive young people to countries where they may not have lived or even speak the language. Discretion, which is used in so many other areas, is especially justified here.”

The issue has been a major point of contention between immigration advocates and President Obama. Advocates have spent months urging the president to take executive action to spare many young illegal immigrants from deportation, and until now Obama has insisted that he did not have the authority to do so.

As word spread of the announcement early Friday , the same advocates who have been sparring with the president and his aides began heaping praise on the administration.

Deepak Bhargava, director of the Center for Community Change who had two tense encounters with Obama during 2010, on Friday credited the president with a “bold act to uphold our values and protect our kids.”

“Approximately 1 million young people will have their dreams restored thanks to the principled leadership of President Obama,” Bhargava said.

The new policy drew an immediate rebuke from Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a leading GOP critic of Obama’s immigration policies. He charged that the president was playing partisan politics and had committed a “breach of faith with the American people.”

The action “also blatantly ignores the rule of law that is the foundation of our democracy,” Smith said. “This huge policy shift has horrible consequences for unemployed Americans looking for jobs and violates President Obama’s oath to uphold the laws of this land.”

The policy is designed to aid immigrants who would have been affected by the DREAM Act, a Democratic-backed bill that would have put many students and veterans on a path to citizenship but failed to win passage in Congress. The White House had been reluctant to go around Congress to resolve the issue, but began to feel pressure from advocates when a prominent Hispanic Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, began working with activists on a scaled-back version of the bill.

In a statement Friday, Rubio criticized Obama’s action, though with carefully tempered language.

“There is broad support for the idea that we should figure out a way to help kids who are undocumented through no fault of their own, but there is also broad consensus that it should be done in a way that does not encourage illegal immigration in the future,” Rubio said. “This is a difficult balance to strike, one that this new policy, imposed by executive order, will make harder to achieve in the long run.”