OBAMA LEFT A BACKLOG OF MORE THAN A HALF MILLION ILLEGAL ALIENS

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:

“For a large part of the last four or five years we’ve been unable to take enforcement action against those individuals,” the Washington Examiner quoted ICE official Matthew Albence as saying earlier this week in explaining why U.S. immigration officials have a backlog of 550,000 illegal aliens. Albence is executive associate director for enforcement and removal operations.

Two reasons are given for this exceptionally large backlog. One,
former President Barack Obama handed many of them temporary amnesty, and
two, others were allowed to stay by judges sympathetic to illegal
immigration.
Obama began delaying deportation actions in large numbers in 2014.
Albence explained that even if officers of the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) found an illegal alien in jail, they were discouraged
from taking him into custody. “Our officers had to turn their heads or
walk the other way. So that’s a large part of that problem, the fact
that we couldn’t enforce the law.”
Even some illegals sought for murder were protected.
Acting ICE Director Thomas Homan also asserted, “We need to hold
judges accountable.” Another problem he cited was the hundreds of
sanctuary cities which have not allowed ICE officers to take illegal
aliens into custody, even if they are in their jails. ICE under the
Trump administration intends to fight those cities and other obstacles,
Homan added. He believes this will send a message to those here
illegally that they are still subject to deportation, even if they have
been in the country for a decade.
“There has to be a consequence and a deterrence to illegal activity
or the illegal activity won’t stop,” Homan pointed out. “We’ve made a
lot of headway this year — more than I’ve seen in a long time — and
we’ve got to keep going down this road. We’ve got to keep momentum
going.”

It is quite clear that the Obama administration, up to and including
the president, favored the influx of illegal aliens. What would be the
motivation?
Certainly, a long-range goal was increasing the number of voters
expected to cast their ballots for Democrat candidates. In the meantime,
the Obama administration probably assumed that, by taking such a
lenient approach to removing persons inside the country here illegally,
he would garner increased political participation from ethnic groups
with large numbers of immigrants. While many often think of Hispanics
when they hear of “illegal aliens,” ICE also has had problems in dealing
with a large Iraqi population in the Detroit area.
The problem, of course, did not originate with Obama. In 1965, the
Hart-Celler Act radically changed American immigration laws, abolishing
the quota system. The law replaced the quotas with preferences based on
family relationships. In 1988, Democratic consultant Patrick Reddy
praised the Kennedys for this change, declaring, “The 1965 Immigration
Reform Act promoted by President Kennedy, drafted by Attorney General
Robert Kennedy, and pushed through the Senate by Ted Kennedy has
resulted in a wave of immigration from the Third World that should shift
the nation in a more liberal direction within a generation. It will go
down as the Kennedy family’s greatest gift to the Democratic Party.”
Historian Tom Woods commented on the effect of this surge in
immigration, legal and illegal, asking whether we will “be more or less
free after even two more generations of immigration the size and
composition of recent decades. That immigrants and the American
bureaucracy that serves them will become yet another pressure group,
clamoring for privileges and benefits in Washington, can scarcely be
doubted.”
He continued, zeroing in on the problem we now face. “In order to
destroy the cultural and ethnic cohesion that acts as a bulwark against
its expansion, the state has a history of engaging in deliberate
scrambling. When this forced integration inevitably produces animosity,
the state is all too eager to impose order on a chaos of its own
creation.”
Woods concluded, “A facile advocacy of open borders gives the central
state exactly what it wants: the chance to supersede the preferences of
property owners, and to provide the pretext for further encroachments
on local and individual liberty.”
So, it is not too surprising that President Obama and his allies favored the coddling of illegal aliens.
Hopefully, simply enforcing present federal laws against illegal
immigration will be one of the legacies of the Trump presidency.