The Obama administration delivered some very good news Thursday, announcing a breakthrough in its enforcement of immigration policy: deportations of undocumented immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety have effectively been suspended.
The White House can’t change the law unilaterally, but it can choose to prioritize among cases and create a more sensible and more humane immigration policy. The most obvious beneficiaries are children who entered the country illegally with their families at a young age, and who will be allowed to stay in the only country they’ve ever called home.
Republicans did not exactly embrace the news.
In a news release, Reps. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Candice Miller (R-Mich.), chairwoman of the Homeland Security subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, said:
“This new non-enforcement policy announced by the Obama Administration Thursday is a blatant attempt to grant amnesty to potentially millions of illegal aliens in this country.” … King and Miller called the policy “totally unacceptable.”
Fox News, meanwhile, not only threw a fit, but even raised the specter of presidential impeachment over this.
Given all of this, it’s worth noting that the Obama administration doesn’t seem to care about Republican outrage. It was no doubt expected, and by all appearances, deemed irrelevant.
Adam Serwer had a good post yesterday, calling Obama’s move “a huge deal,” adding, “This decision is precisely the kind of ballsy move that liberals are constantly demanding that the administration make. For once — and let’s not pretend the Latino vote in 2012 isn’t a part of the political calculus here — they’re actually doing it.”
