IN an interview with the Spanish network Telemundo, Democratic White House contender Hillary Clinton accused the Obama administration of breaking up families through an “aggressive” deportation policy, calling current immigration policies too “harsh.”
Her comments echoed long-running complaints of the immigration advocates, who argue that President Obama’s immigration programs are “overly harsh,” said the Wall Street Journal.
“The deportation laws were interpreted and enforced, you know, very aggressively during the last six and a half years, which I think his administration did in part to try to get Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform,” Clinton said Monday, Oct. 5 to Telemundo News’s Maria Celeste Arrarás. “It was part of a strategy. I think that strategy is no longer workable.”
“So therefore, I think, we have to go back to being a much less harsh and aggressive enforcer,” she added.
Beforehand, Clinton has faithfully defended the president, arguing that the deportations that occurred on his watch were not a matter of choice, but were all that he could do within the law, said CBS News.
The comments also contradicted a remark Clinton made in 2014 with CNN: “I also think that we have to understand the difficulty that President Obama finds himself in because there are laws that impose certain obligations on him.”
The number of deportations under the Obama administration in the past 12 months has been at a record low for the first time since 2006, The Associated Press reported on Tuesday, Oct. 6. Though more than 2.4 million immigrants have been deported since he took office in 2009, they have declined by 84,000 between 2014 and 2015 — marking the largest year-over-year decline since 2012.
In November 2014, President Obama ordered to prioritize the deportation of people with serious criminal convictions, gang members, and those who have crossed the border recently. The action all but directed that most other undocumented immigrants could continue living in the US without fear of removal.
Obama promised to push for immigration reform early in his presidency, but the legislative battle did not begin in earnest until 2013, after he began his second term. Later, the Senate took up and passed a comprehensive bill, but not before deportation figures were climbing every year under Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the US border security budget surged. Many considered the president’s actions a way to show Republicans that he was serious about enforcement, so they would approve a plan that included a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, according to Huffington Post.
“I think we’ve learned that the Republicans, at least the current crop, are just not acting in good faith,” Clinton said Monday.
Clinton also said that she would continue to deport violent people and felons, but said too many “upright, productive people with a minor offense had been hauled in and deported. And I’ve met their wives and their children–and I just don’t believe in that.”
To her supporters, Clinton said she would order these changes within her first 100 days in office by directing her Department of Homeland Security to “take a hard look about how we change the way the laws are applied.”
Over the past few months, the former secretary of state has worked hard to win the hearts of her Hispanic voters–an important constituency in the Democratic Party.
She also repeated her promise to expand upon Obama’s DREAM Act, as well as his earlier attempt to grant temporary relief for eligible undocumented immigrants, and issue work permits to some four million who have been in the US for at least five years and have naturalized or LPR (legal permanent residents) children. Obama’s policies–in the form of executive actions–are now being challenged in court.
“I want to do more on an individual basis by putting more resources, more personnel into the system to try to help as many people as possible get a different status,” Clinton told Arrarás, adding that she would consider additional people for deportation relief who are not currently covered.
She also repeated that she would keep fighting to get approval in Congress for an immigration bill that was already tried by Obama.
“In the meantime, I’m not gonna be breaking up families,” she said. “I think everybody is entitled to a second chance. I don’t want to see families disrupted, families deported. I want to see comprehensive immigration reform.”
