Posted on 08/01/2014 3:31:26 PM PDT by Liz
A senior U.S. immigration official--an Obama appointee--told a House committee that 580,000 illegal immigrants have avoided deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).....about 30,000 more approvals than the 553,000 the government reported in May.
Obama appointee, Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (a DHS agency), provided the updated number for the House Judiciary Committee hearing this past Tuesday.
USCIS is the main federal agency overseeing lawful immigration to the United States.
DACA not only allows non-citizens to avoid deportation, but also allows some participants to qualify for work authorization.
Rodriguez also said that the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the program, is beginning the second phase of DACA. The second phase relates to renewing deferred action status for those who have already received it.
Under the program, illegal immigrants must formally apply for deferred action, and this status expires after two years. Rodriguez said the first grants of deferred action will expire in September.
DACA has been extremely controversial among Republicans, many of whom argue that it has attracted even more illegal immigrants who hope to find a form of amnesty in the United States. But Rodriguez defended the policy as an act of prosecutorial discretion that allows DHS to focus on other priorities.
“This effort is part of a greater DHS effort to ensure that valuable and limited enforcement resources are spent wisely on those individuals who are a danger to national security or a risk to public safety,” Rodriguez said. “DACA reflects, on a larger scale, the exercise of the prosecutorial discretion that is inherent in every individual encounter in which DHS engages.”
Rodriguez added that the possibility of work authorization “helps achieve the social benefit of lifting these individuals out of the underground economy and enabling them to participate in the mainstream economy.”
The GOP says DACA is a main driver of the roughly 60,000 illegal immigrant children who have crossed the southern U.S. border so far this fiscal year.
On that issue, Rodriguez noted that his agency has initial jurisdiction over asylum applications by immigrant children who are not subject to expedited removal procedures.
He said that as of June, USCIS has received more than 1,500 asylum claims from children. Just 167 have been adjudicated, so far, and of these, 108, or nearly 65 percent, have been granted asylum status.
That’s a bit higher than the roughly 50 percent asylum rate that some officials and members of Congress have estimated in recent hearings.
Rodriguez also noted that only 163 of the roughly 1,500 asylum claims have come from children apprehended in the current fiscal year, and said most kids wait nearly a year in the U.S. before seeking asylum status.
“According to our records, most unaccompanied children who are apprehended at the border file for asylum with USCIS more than 300 days after entering the United States,” he said.
After serving as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn (a state, not a federal position), Rodriquez moved to the U.S. attorney's staff in Pittsburgh, winding up as the first assistant there. He also was in private practice, and from 2007 through 2010 he was the County Attorney for Montgomery County, Md., a Democratic stronghold. He held political positions in the Obama Justice and DHHS departments before his current nomination.
According to reporting by Kenric Ward, Washington correspondent for WatchDog.org, Rodriguez' nomination faced Republican opposition for this position, as it did three years earlier when Obama nominated him to be head of the Wage-Hour Administration in the Labor Department, only to withdraw the nomination later.
Rodriguez was a board member of Casa Maryland---a latino-centric advocacy group---pushing for unlimited immigration, and has connections to nationwide immigrant groups.
http://immigration.procon.org/view.timeline.php?timelineID=000023
1837 - Supreme Court Rules in New York v. Miln That States May Take Precautionary Measures Against the Importation of “Paupers, Vagabonds, Convicts, and Infectious Articles”
“The New York laws were challenged in New York v. Miln (1837) (271KB) . The defendant, a ship’s master, argued that the New York laws obstructed interstate and foreign commerce. The Supreme Court, however, sustained the laws as a legitimate exercise of the state’s police power. Justice Philip P. Barbour stated that it was as competent and necessary for a State to provide precautionary measures against the moral pestilence of paupers, vagabonds, and possibly convicts, as it is to guard against the physical pestilence which may arise from unsound or infectious articles imported, or from a ship, the crew of which may be laboring under an infectious disease.”
In an earlier statement----citing a Homeland Security Investigations memo----Sen Charles Grassley said the oversight federal agency ICE identified key vulnerabilities in EB-5 visas:
1) Export of sensitive technology/economic espionage.
2) Use by foreign government agents/espionage.
3) Use by terrorists.
4) Investment fraud by regional center.
5) Investment fraud by investors.
6) Fraud conspiracies by investors and regional center.
7) Illicit finance/money laundering.
(SOURCE--WATCHDOG.ORG)
“Have avoided deportation ...” as though that’s a good thing!
580,000! Damn! That’s a lot of freeloaders. Then people wonder why America is broke.
Ping for later
Documentation File on the 2014 Impeachment of B. Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro a former Foreign Student from Indonesia, and still a legal Citizen of the Sovereign Nation of Indonesia.
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