Obama seeks to let most illegal immigrants stay in U.S.

The Obama administration has begun a profound shift in its enforcement of immigration laws, aiming to hasten the integration of long-term illegal immigrants into society rather than targeting them for deportation, according to documents and federal officials.

In recent months, the Homeland Security Department has taken steps to ensure that most of the 11.3 million illegal immigrants can stay in the U.S. Agents have narrowed enforcement efforts to three groups: convicted criminals, terrorism threats and recent border crossers.

While the public has focused on the court fight over President Barack Obama’s highly publicized executive action on immigration, Homeland Security has with little fanfare been training thousands of immigration agents to carry out new policies on everyday enforcement.

The legal battle centers on the constitutionality of a program that would officially shield up to 5 million eligible illegal immigrants from deportation, mainly parents of children who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. A federal judge put the program, known as DAPA, on hold in February after 26 states sued.

But the shift in enforcement priorities, which are separate from the DAPA program and have not been challenged in court, could prove even more far-reaching.

The new policies direct agents to focus on the three priority groups and leave virtually everyone else alone. Demographic data show that the typical illegal immigrant has lived in the U.S. for a decade or more and has established strong community ties.

While the new measures do not grant illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, their day-to-day lives could change in countless ways. Now, for instance, illegal immigrants who fear deportation say they are so afraid to interact with police that they won’t report crimes and often limit their driving to avoid possible traffic stops. The new policies, if carried out on the ground, could dispel such fears, advocates for immigrants say.

In describing the initiatives, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has echoed the language often used by advocates of comprehensive immigration reform, which remains stalled on Capitol Hill.

“We are making it clear that we should not expend our limited resources on deporting those who have been here for years, have committed no serious crimes and have, in effect, become integrated members of our society,” Johnson said in a recent speech in Houston.

He added, “These people are here, they live among us, and they are not going away.”

‘Don’t go after them’

Since the new policies took effect in January, Johnson’s instructions have been conveyed to agents throughout the department.

“We decided we’re going to draw a clear line between individuals who now have significant equities in the country versus those who are recent entrants,” said one department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

“If people are not an enforcement priority,” the official said, “ … bottom line, the secretary has said, ‘Don’t go after them.’”

America’s massive dragnet is shrinking rapidly, both because of the new enforcement policies and because of declining flows of immigrants across the southwest border, Homeland Security officials say.

Deportations are dropping. The Obama administration is on pace to remove 229,000 people this year, 27 percent less than last year and nearly 50 percent less than the all-time high in 2012.

Fewer people are also in the pipeline for deportation. The number of occupied beds at detention facilities for people arrested on immigration violations has dropped nearly 20 percent this year.

And on Johnson’s orders, officials are reviewing the entire immigrant detainee population — and each of the 400,000 cases in the clogged immigration courts — to weed out those who don’t meet the new priorities.

About 3,000 people have been released from custody or had their cases dropped, officials said.

The policy shift “does have the potential to be extremely significant. It would allow people to live without that noose over their heads of the threat of deportation at all times,” said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

Much skepticism

But Hincapie and other advocates — who have long clashed with the administration over its aggressive enforcement — said the immigrant community is skeptical about whether agents on the ground will adjust their activities to match the new priorities.

“It all sounds great, but it means nothing if it’s not applied,” said Kica Matos, director of human rights and racial justice at the Washington-based Center for Community Change. She faulted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of Homeland Security, for what she called a series of broken promises to enforce immigration laws more humanely.

“DHS is an agency that has terrorized our community for a really long time,” Matos said, “so the level of distrust and fear is really big.”

During Obama’s first presidential campaign, he spoke of illegal immigrants, telling CNN in March 2007: “It’s absolutely vital that we bring those families out of the shadows.”

When his administration took office, the government was adding thousands of new agents hired at the end of President George W. Bush’s term and was ramping up enforcement. Under pressure from Obama’s supporters to end Bush’s post-9-11 crackdown on illegal immigrants, Homeland Security tried to target these efforts.

“There were no comprehensive, written enforcement priorities,” said John Sandweg, a top immigration adviser to then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. “Everyone in the country unlawfully was fair game.”

At ICE, then-Director John Morton put out two 2011 memos laying out the agency’s priorities: protecting public safety and national security and securing the border.

In a move cheered by activists, Morton also said agents could exercise “prosecutorial discretion” and decide not to deport certain immigrants taken into custody based on factors such as their length of stay in the U.S.

At the same time, Homeland Security expanded a Bush administration program called Secure Communities. It allowed ICE to lodge official requests with local police departments that had arrested someone whom ICE wanted to deport. The requests called on police to hold the immigrants for up to 48 hours after their scheduled release so ICE could pick them up.

As Secure Communities took hold, deportations kept climbing, reaching an all-time high of 409,000 in 2012. Even as Republicans blasted the administration for what they called lax enforcement, prominent Latino and other groups derided Obama as the “deporter in chief.”

“There was a lot of big talk coming out of DHS, big promises that they were going to be more sensitive to immigrant families, said Nick Katz, a staff attorney for Make the Road New York, an immigran- rights group. “And then it didn’t make a fundamental impact on the ground.”

A rebellion was also brewing against Secure Communities, which had been billed as a way to crack down on immigrants who had committed serious crimes.

About 300 communities, including major cities such as Baltimore and Los Angeles, ended or scaled back their participation.

This story was originally published July 2, 2015 at 5:47 PM with the headline "Obama seeks to let most illegal immigrants stay in U.S.."