“The bothersome reality,” GOP strategist Ed Rogers wrote in last Friday’s Washington Post, “is that President Obama is inventing new laws, selectively choosing to enforce laws he likes and ignoring or amending the ones he doesn’t.”
Rogers was making the argument that talk of impeaching the president is not only not cheap, as many Democrats insist, but picking up steam.
If Rogers was in need of fresh ammunition to make his case, Obama that very same day announced a policy that flouts immigration law. His administration released a memo instructing agents with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not to arrest and/or deport illegal immigrant parents of minor children.
Called the “Family Interest Directive,” the memo urges agents to use “prosecutorial discretion” in an effort to avoid detaining parents.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte said of the measure:
President Obama has once again abused his authority and unilaterally refused to enforce our current immigration laws by directing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stop removing broad categories of unlawful immigrants.
But it’s worse than that. The directive is an open invitation to individuals to cross the border into the U.S. illegally, which they can now do with impunity as long as they come as a family. There is no need for them to worry about being stopped provided they have one or more children under age 21 in tow.
The Washington Times notes that the move won praise from immigrant-rights groups, who said it’s a step toward a less harsh detention policy.
The memo is the latest in a series of directives issued by the Obama administration that try to establish priorities with respect to whom the government will detain and try to deport. A year ago, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a policy granting tentative legal status to DREAMers — young illegal immigrants brought to the country as children. That policy began accepting applications in August 2012, and as of the end of this July had approved legal status for more than 430,000 illegal immigrants.
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