Legal Commentary

Napolitano Continues Bush's Punitive Immigration Enforcement Policy

By Jeralyn

While President Obama said this week that immigration reform will have to wait until next year, his Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, has been racheting up former Bush policies of punitive enforcement.

Janet Napolitano, defended the administration’s assertive strategy against illegal immigrants and companies that employ them, relying largely on programs started under President George W. Bush.

....Ms. Napolitano said security problems on the border were inextricably linked not only to the drug trade, but also to the problem of illegal workers in far-flung cities across the country. The government needs to address illegal immigration at the same time it attacks the Mexican mafias, she said.

[More...]

Critics point out:

“How many more millions if not billions of dollars are we going to put into the border without fixing the immigration system?” asked Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said of Ms. Napolitano, “She’s increasing enforcement of laws that President Obama and she have both said are broken, and the result is going to be a lot of human misery.”

In her speech:

Still, the speech was notable for its lack of a single passage about the positive role many illegal immigrants play in society, a concession that has become standard in most political pronouncements from Democrats on the subject.

And by the numbers:

[S]he pointed out that the Obama administration had outdone the Bush White House. Immigration agents have arrested 181,000 illegal immigrants and deported 215,000 people so far this year. Both figures are double what they were for the same period two years ago, she said.

And while she says the focus is not on arresting the undocumented who have not broken other laws, where is the change? The path to citizenship? The ability to come out of the shadows? A promise to make family reunification a priority?

She's all border control and no reform. Just another top cop exercising muscle.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 12, 2009 (boomark / email).