This post combines work by the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Blake Neff, and the LU Staff.
Obama Will Hand Massive List Of Illegal Immigrants To Trump, Complete With Addresses
President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to secure the border and enforce America’s immigration laws will get an unexpected boost from outgoing President Barack Obama
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Over the last four years, Obama launched two efforts to effectively block the deportation of certain illegal immigrants. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), begun in 2012, blocked deportation for so-called “dreamers,” who arrived in the U.S. illegally as children. Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA), started in 2014, blocked the deportation of adults who had American citizen children. DAPA was largely invalidated by federal court rulings, but DACA is still in place for the time being.
More than 1.4 million people applied for DACA, and an unknown additional amount for DAPA, and both required providing the government their name and home address. At the time, the government pledged that all information provided would be hidden from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcers, but there is no legal guarantee to ensure that remains the case forever.
With Trump soon entering the White House, this vast trove of information on illegal immigrants could be invaluable if the president-elect holds to his pledge of taking a hard line on immigration.
“I was surprised anyone would be stupid enough to sign up for DACA and DAPA, yet apparently hundreds of thousands of people did so anyway,” John Miano of the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies said in a Thursday blog post. “Now that the election is over and it is clear that DACA and DAPA will soon be kaput, people are beginning to realize that DACA and DAPA have created a list of prime candidates for deportation with names, addresses, and an admission of illegal alien status.”
LU comment: New York Mayor Bill de Blasio may not be able to do much about the DACA/DAPA databases, per se. But he has already signaled that he’d be prepared to scrub New York City’s entire database of information on municipal ID cards if necessary, to prevent President Trump from using that information to identify illegals for deportation.
Apparently, it doesn’t bother him that this would leave the municipal ID card program wide open to fraud. Once the database was purged, there would be no way to verify anyone’s NYC municipal ID.
It wouldn’t take long for businesses and other entities to stop accepting the municipal ID — for fear of lawsuits, if for no other reason. No threat the mayor could make about this would hold up in any court. The whole purpose of the program would be defeated. In the meantime, however, a wave of fraudulent ID cards would undoubtedly cause the city a great deal of trouble.
One hopes that saner heads would prevail among de Blasio’s circle of advisers. But not too many progressives seem to be thinking straight these days.
Blake Neff’s article cross-posted by arrangement with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
