President Obama's Deportation Policy is Failing

It was in June, 2011, that Obama announced new rules for applying "prosecutorial discretion" or PD, to allow ICE\INS attorney's to only go after illegal immigrants and be deported if they had serious crimes. The new guidelines would allow those illegally here with no or minor offenses be put in the PD review, allowing them to prosecute or not, those types of cases.

So it began. ICE began reviewing 300,000 cases with this new guideline mindset. That year, only 2% were stopped. Today, the number is a mere 7% of the cases were stopped before they were going to be deported. In Puerto Rico, the percentage is 40% of the cases. In Seattle and San Diego, it is 24%. Your chances of getting not deported if caught illegally here in Texas is only 1%. I guess you can say, Texas has zero-tolerance for illegals when caught. In San Francisco, the number is 7%, while in LA, 12%.

Apparently, ICE has set the bar very high for a case to be in the PD process, all others automatically get deported. Immigration attorney's cite many examples where the illegal has only one or two minor offenses, like driving without a license, or even no record and their client begins the deportation proceedings with no explanation. Even a DUI of seven years ago and a clean record since is of no good for PD, they will get deported. Another with a fake ID has ruined many lives of the family members they leave behind.

Private attorney's no longer even waste their or the clients time if the illegal has any arrest record or conviction of a serious crime. Worse, 45% of the PD cases are deported even if there is NO criminal record on the illegal. To get into the PD review, the illegal has to have family in the area, is a perfect citizen with no police record for anything. Only about 1 out of 3 cases qualify for the PD.

Then, there are those who have lived here all their lives, being brought here as young kids. They are American, some know very little Spanish, yet they get deported also for driving without a license. These people often have no ties to Mexico at all, or very minor ones, yet get tossed into a culture they did not grow up in. In their case, their only hope is to file a DACA application because they have lived in the USA all their life and have gone to school here the whole time.

So, those undocumented face only a small chance for prosecutorial discretion to not be deported. That was not Obama's intent.