WASHINGTON — Signaling another partisan fight over immigration enforcement after this week’s midterm elections, all seven Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee signed a letter this month asking the Department of Homeland Security how much money it needs to deport every illegal alien the government encounters.
The request came in an Oct. 21 letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and asks her to “detail exactly how much funding” would be needed “to ensure that enforcement of the law occurs consistently for every illegal alien encountered andapprehended.” The Republican senators requested a response by Nov. 15, two weeks after the midterm elections.
The Obama administration, which in its first full year in office set a record for deportations by the United States, wants to continue its policy of focusing law-enforcement resources on securing the border, bolstering the Border Patrol, and deporting dangerous and violent offenders who are in the U.S. illegally. At the same time, President Barack Obama supports legislative changes that would create a path to legal status for longtime residents who meet specific criteria.
Republicans on key oversight committees in Congress favor a more uniform enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. In an election cycle that has inflamed the debate, Republicans in leadership positions have been reluctant to endorse a potential path to legal status for any of the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal aliens.
An Obama administration official responded that the zero-tolerance approach suggested in the senators’ letter is more political theater than a realistic plan for solving the nation’s illegal-alien problem.
The GOP letter came in response to directives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, including an Aug.20 memo in which Morton requested that U.S. attorneys consider dismissing immigration cases against people who have a green card application pending and are likely to be approved. A subsequent temporary spike in dismissals in Houston, first reported by the Houston Chronicle, caught the attention of Republican lawmakers.
The senators’ letter to Napolitano claims the government is routinely dismissing cases against illegal aliens who have no felony convictions and “no more than two misdemeanors,” and says the practice “raises serious questions about your Department’s commitment to enforce the immigration laws.”
Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the senior Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, who is in line to take over the chairmanship if the GOP regains a majority, said: “The best solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to enforce current laws.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a budget of $5.7 billion, the most funding it has ever had, and it has the capacity to deport about 390,000 people a year, or less than 4 percent of the people who are in the U.S. illegally. A rough estimate of the cost of deporting 11 million people would require a budget on the order of $80 billion, said a senior administration official familiar withthe agency’s budget.
The Obama administration deported 392,862 people last year, up from the 369,221 people deported two years earlier in the last full year of the Bush administration.
In an interview broadcast on Univision on Oct. 25, Obama was pressed to stop his administration’s record deportations. Obama said his administration’s approach to deporting illegal aliens “puts less emphasis on families, more emphasis on those with criminal records.”
But the only way to achieve true immigration overhaul is to change the law, Obama said, and to do that, he needs Republican votes in Congress.
Front Section, Pages 5 on 10/31/2010