Obama won two-thirds of the Hispanic vote in 2008 by promising immigration policies would be a top priority in his first term and would be overhauled.

 

But Obama failed to deliver Immigration Reform granting a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and instead, Obama implemented Secure Communities, a deportation program, used to deport more than 1.2 million undocumented immigrants since 2009.

 

Obama's failure with Immigration has resulted in deep Hispanic disappointment with Obama.

 

In 2011, U.S. immigration policy continues as the number one issue with Hispanic voters, according to a poll conducted by the independent research firm Latino Decisions.

 

Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19.

 

Among Hispanics, Obama’s job approval rating  has plummeted since its high mark in March 2009, according to Gallup, from 82 percent to 48 percent in August 2011.

 

Obama's failure with Immigration Reform has led to a wave of immigration laws that has swept through states since 2006 with state legislators expected to introduce about 1,400 bills this year.

 

Since last fall, both English- and Spanish-language media have heavily chronicled record deportations and controversial enforcement policies promoted by President Barack Obama's administration.

 

After the latest defeat of the Dream Act, Obama was pressed to use “Prosecutorial Discretion” to avoid deporting Young Immigrants. Obama countered with an invitation to Hispanics to the White House where they were told he had no authority to decrease deportations.

 

Obama stated he could not break the law regarding deportations. One of the props used to support what Obama claimed was Eva Longoria bedazzled with a White House invitation where she was told the world is flat not round.

 

Longoria swallowed Obama's lie — hook, line and sinker.

 

Gullible Eva Longoria read from her prepared White House script, "We would like to blame Obama for inaction on lessening deportations, but he can’t just disobey the law that’s written.’’

 

But there is no humor found with utterances of those who are used by Obama to preach the Obama mantra: Hilda L. Solis, Katherine Archuleta and Cecilia Muñoz, the White House official who oversees immigration policy, said "Mr. Obama strongly favors Secure Communities because he does not have the option of saying, while I’m waiting for Congress to come forward, I am not going to bother to enforce the law.”

"The Secure Communities program is the best tool we have,” added Muñoz, “to enforce the law in the best possible way.”

 

Cecilia Muñoz, President Obama's White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, appeared on national television defending the indefensible: the Administration's enforcement-only immigration policies. These policies have devastated Hispanic and immigrant communities throughout the United States. During an interview on "Lost in Detention," a PBS documentary, Ms. Muñoz defended the controversial program S-COMM, which allows local police to share information with immigration.

As a former advocate for immigrant rights, Ms. Muñoz understands how S-COMM has exponentially increased fear in immigrant communities. This, in turn, has caused mistrust and a lack of cooperation between local communities and law enforcement agencies. This is confirmed by police chiefs and elected officials such as the Governors of Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. In these states, voters have demanded to opt out of S-COMM. Recently, the Warren Institute at the University of California-Berkeley released findings from a study on S-COMM that revealed the very disturbing fact 93% of those arrested under S-COMM were Hispanics even though only 77% of the undocumented immigrant population in the US is Hispanic.

This alone should be enough to make Ms. Muñoz reject any claim S-COMM is good for this country. It is even more disturbing to hear a defense of S-COMM from someone who made her career defending the rights of immigrants. During her tenure as vice-president at the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), we would continuously hear her calling Sheriff Joe Arpaio's rampant enforcement of immigration a "reign of terror." Yet, she is now the main spokesperson for a program that allows local police officials like Arpaio to massively racially profile Hispanics in 1,595 jurisdictions.

Ms. Muñoz did not just defend S-COMM. She also defended an immigrant detention and deportation system responsible for untold abuses of human and civil rights. She specifically said more than 50% of individuals deported were "criminals" and the administration is seeking to stop low priority deportations. It's hard to believe "there must be" 400,000 new undocumented threats to society each year. To assert so is to racially and ethnically profile Hispanics by itself. Yet this is what Ms. Muñoz wants us to believe.

It's important to set the record straight about a particular talking point Ms. Muñoz uses multiple times regarding the number of high priority detainees. According to ICE's own numbers, only 22% of immigrants deported during 2011 would be deemed high priority. The other 78% were captured and jailed for non-violent crimes or traffic violations. What we need to observe here is a sickening attempt to further criminalize a community whose only purpose has been to fight for the American dream. The 400,000 quota is a shameful fact Ms. Muñoz almost seemed to boast about during her interview in "Lost in Detention."

The other 45% of deportations Ms. Muñoz could not justify as "criminals" she simply called "collateral damage," a euphemism that comes to us from war. She said, "There will be parents separated from their children. We don't have to like it..."

 

The 2012 presidential election is up for grabs and in early 2012, Hispanic News will ask Mexican Americans and other Hispanic democrats not to vote for Obama unless Obama makes concessions and only actions will be accepted. Obama has no creditability with promises so only actual actions will be accepted to regain Hispanic votes.

 

Obama's failures are now being drafted: "Jon Garrido Accuses Barack Hussein Obama of Betrayal and Failure of Leadership of America," and at the beginning of the Indictment is a demand Obama end the Secure Communities Program and fire Janet Napolitano and Cecilia Muñoz.

Jon Garrido

Owner and CEO of Hispanic News
Obama Speeds Deportations

WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Julia Preston, NYT)  November 17, 2011 ― The Department of Homeland Security will begin a review today of all deportation cases before the immigration courts and start a nationwide training program for enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers, with the goal of speeding deportations of convicted criminals and halting those of many illegal immigrants with no criminal record.

The accelerated triage of the court docket — about 300,000 cases — is intended to allow severely overburdened immigration judges to focus on deporting foreigners who committed serious crimes or pose national security risks, Homeland Security officials said. Taken together, the review and the training, which will instruct immigration agents on closing deportations that fall outside the department’s priorities, are designed to bring sweeping changes to the immigration courts and to enforcement strategies of field agents nationwide.

According to a document obtained by The New York Times, Homeland Security officials will issue guidelines on Thursday to begin the training program and the first stages of the court caseload review. Both are efforts to put into practice a policy senior officials had announced in June, to encourage immigration agents to use prosecutorial discretion when deciding whether to pursue a deportation.

The policy, described in a June 17 memorandum by John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, suggested that the Obama administration would scale back deportations of illegal immigrants who were young students, military service members, elderly people or close family of American citizens, among others. While the announcement raised excited expectations in Hispanic and other immigrant communities, until now the policy has been applied spottily, deepening disillusionment with President Obama in those communities.

The Obama administration has removed high numbers of illegal immigrants, nearly 400,000 in each of the last three years. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Mr. Morton said those numbers would not decrease, but they wanted agents and courts to focus on deporting the worst offenders, including national security risks, criminal convicts and those who repeatedly violate immigration laws. Many immigration offenses, including being present in the United States without legal status, are civil violations; they are not crimes.

Administration officials have flexibility to transform immigration court procedures because those courts are part of the Justice Department in the executive branch, not part of the federal judiciary. Central to the plan is giving more power to immigration agency lawyers — the equivalent of prosecutors in the federal court system — to decide which deportation cases to press.

“We are empowering the attorneys nationally to make them more like federal prosecutors, who decide what cases to bring,” said a senior Homeland Security official, who asked not to be named because the policy has not been formally announced.

In the first stage of the court docket review, which will begin on Thursday, immigration agency lawyers will examine all new cases just arriving in immigration courts nationwide, with an eye to closing cases that are low-priority according to the Morton memorandum, before they advance into the court system.

At the same time, immigrants identified as high priority will see their cases put onto an expedited calendar for judges to order their deportations, Homeland Security officials said.

The goal is to “reduce inefficiencies that delay the removal of criminal aliens and other priority cases by preventing new low priority cases from clogging the immigration court dockets,” the Homeland Security document said. Officials said the first stage was an “initial test run” that would be completed by Jan. 13.

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group that analyzes immigration court data, reported in September that the backlog before the nation’s 59 immigration courts was at “a new all-time high.”

In a second stage, to begin Dec. 4, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department will start six-week pilot projects in the immigration courts in Baltimore and Denver, in which teams of immigration agency lawyers will comb through the current dockets of those courts. They will focus on cases of immigrants who have been arrested for deportation, but who are not being held in detention while their cases proceed.

Immigrants who are deemed to qualify for prosecutorial discretion will have their cases closed, but not dismissed, officials said. That means that agents could re-open the deportations at any time if the immigrants commit a crime or a new immigration violation. Immigrants whose cases are closed will be allowed to remain in the United States, but they will be in legal limbo, without any positive immigration status.

The pilot projects will also end on Jan. 13, and then officials will decide how to expand the program to all immigration courts nationwide early next year.

Also today, Homeland Security officials will introduce a training program based on scenarios that could arise in enforcement operations, which every Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent must complete by mid-January. The goal is to instruct agents, many of whom have expressed doubts about Mr. Morton’s policy, to apply the prosecutorial discretion criteria.

Homeland Security in this new policy publically admits agents the approach of deporting some illegal immigrants but not others requires a deep change in the mentality of the agents, who have long operated on the principle that any violation was cause for deportation.

Jon Garrido believes, "The primary question has always been: What defines criminal record? Is jaywalking or driving a car with a burned out tail light justify being tagged with a criminal record? This has been the case for the first three years of the Obama administration and will probably be continued "Probable Cause" for arrest labeling the undocumented as having a criminal record. This is the policy used by local police enforcement such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio in arresting undocumented then calling ICE to deport the arrested undocumented for having a criminal record."

"Will the new policy extend to local police enforcement such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio? Will ICE stop answering the phone when Arpaio calls ICE to deport an undocumented person now with a criminal record for being arrested for having a broken tail light?

"All the above confirms Obama lied in the first three years of his administration stating he had to uphold the law and deport all undocumented. Obviously, Obama lied he has no authority to reduce deportations. And the proof of his lie is, Obama has now changed who gets deported. I think Obama is using smoke and mirrors to obtain Hispanic votes but in the end, Obama will not be re-elected," claims Jon Garrido, owner and CEO of Hispanic News.

Republicans in Congress have denounced the new deportations policy, accusing the Obama administration of trying an end-run around Congress by granting de facto amnesty to illegal immigrants. Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the prosecutorial discretion policy had the “specific purpose of overruling or preventing orders of removal for illegal immigrants.”

Administration officials said they would proceed case by case using existing legal authorities, and had no plans to exempt any large group of illegal immigrants from deportation.