The Obama administration on Friday put into effect the ‘Deferred Action Process’ which has in the past been referred to as ‘the Dream-Act’.
Rush Limbaugh call’s it ‘Catch, Release and Vote’.
The decision has bypassed Congress, which has repeatedly failed to pass a bill granting legal status to this category of illegal immigrants.
The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies.
The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation. It also bypasses Congress and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act, a long-sought but never enacted plan to establish a path toward citizenship for young people who came to the United States illegally but who have attended college or served in the military.
In what many consider purely political, the administration only 5 1/2 months before the Presidential election is granting amnesty to illegal aliens.
90 percent of Latino voters say they support the ‘Dream Act’.
GOP candidate and Obama opponent Mitt Romney is on record as opposing the ‘Dream Act’.
Latino voters already support President Obama over Mitt Romney, according to a NBC News-Wall Street Journal-Telemundo poll , but more importantly only 68 percent of Latino voters said they were “highly interested” in the upcoming election, compared to 81 percent overall.
For years the Obama administration had said it didn’t have the authority to make such a move, saying it couldn’t just decide to stop deporting wide categories of people on its own without approval from Congress.
But on Friday Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said she now interprets the law to give her this discretion.
The new policy, ’Deferred Action Process’, being announced on a Friday which is traditionally the day for “document dumps”and may have something to do with this leak;
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency charged with guarding the U.S. borders, has written a secret draft policy that would let its agents catch and release low-priority illegal immigrants rather than bring them in for processing and prosecution.
The policy, which has not been signed off on, would be the latest move by the Obama administration to set new priorities for the nation’s immigration services, and would bring CBP in line with otherHomeland Security Department agencies that already use such “prosecutorial discretion.”
The policy was detailed in an internal memo obtained by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith and reviewed by The Washington Times, which confirmed the document.
According to the memo, the draft policy “provides circumstances when to pursue enforcement actions … and includes detailed discussion of several factors CBP personnel should consider when exercising discretion.”
Opponents say it amounts to another “backdoor amnesty” for illegal immigrants and could give the administration a tool to pressure Border Patrol agents not to pursue some people.
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I have friends in Texas who live in fear because of all the murders and rapes from the Mexican drug cartel who come into US in droves each day because we aren't stopping them. Al Queda is freely coming in through South America into Texas. Obama would sell his daughters for campaign dollars…what a horrible man and all the people who let it happen! I'm ashamed of our lack of leadership.