White House Delays Immigration Action: Politics Over People

In response to the President’s announcement today that he will again delay executive action on immigration, Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, released the following:

“Today’s news is a clear statement from Washington that once again, politics trumps the lives of people.

Six years ago, President Obama was elected on a pledge to pass immigration reform in the first 100 days of his term. Instead, his administration has squandered the opportunity to move a bill under a majority Democratic Congress.

They have chosen to continue the previous administration’s “endgame” enforcement policies to build and expand a deportation machinery that has torn families apart, criminalized working class people whose labor we benefit from, and only served to benefit private prisons and private military contractors on the border.

Yet again the President asks the people for more time. Our families don’t have that time – not when ICE’s arbitrary quotas demand that 32,000 people be detained a day and 1,100 end up being deported daily.

The major lesson for our movement now is to overcome the cruel partisan gamesmanship that dominates our culture, and for the people most impacted to escalate our activity and voices on the ground.

That’s how we defeated draconian legislation like Sensenbrenner’s HR 4437 or Arizona-style criminalization laws, and secured meaningful victories like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

And that’s why we’ll mobilize harder than than ever to defend our communities, in the face of these cynical political calculations.”