Congressional Democrats and immigrant-right groups confronted the Obama administration over recent raids seeking Central American immigrants for deportation. Democrats accused the president of spreading terror through immigrant communities, and warned him that the controversial strategy will stain his legacy on immigration.
Democrats' rage began to simmer when the news of the planned raids leaked over Christmas. But the anger boiled this week when Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson defended the raid, and heated up by a rumor about more raid operations underway in other states.
A statement issued earlier this week by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that 121 people with final orders of removal, who had exhausted their legal claims and remedies, had been targeted for removal. Johnson said that those immigrants had all arrived in the country after May 2104, which is in line with administration policy that focuses on deporting criminals and those who came in the country illegally after Jan 1, 2014.
On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called a meeting in her chambers or about 20 Democrats with many of them from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Washington Post reported. On the meeting, Democrate lawmakers condemned Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Munoz for seeking to deport Central American migrants and for spreading fear through immigrant communities.
State Representative of Illinois Luis Gutierrez, who was in the meeting, said that President Barack Obama risks all the goodwill he has built up over the last year through his executive actions sparing millions from deportation, actions now tied up in court. Gutierrez said he was very disappointed and disillusioned that the administration did not alert congressional allies before conducting the raids, Seattle Times reported.
Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the sole Latino Democrat in the Senate, said in a statement to Politico that the raids are the administration's harsh tactics as they are targetting undocumented immigrants whose only mistake was to excape a certain death in their native countries.
On Thursday meeting, Cecilia Munoz explained that the administration decided to launch the deportations because the numbers of Central American migrants keep growing when they should have been falling. But House Democrats argue that the wave of Central American migrants coming into the country, are no ordinary immigrants.
Guiterrez said that the wave of the Central American migrants is not an immigration issue, but it is a refugee issue. "It isn't about your right to come to the United States of America, it's about your right to be able to seek refuge and not to be murdered," Gutierrez said.
