Obama: Dreamers and Deportations
- Carrie Stallings
- Oct 29
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 31
Welcome to my six-part series on immigration in the United States! I hope it will be a helpful tool for you as you navigate the confusing and contradictory messages we hear about this topic. I recommend reading the articles in the order listed, but you can do what you want. I'm not the boss of you.
Obama: Dreamers and Deportations (this article)
I love Barack Obama. I really do. His charisma, his diplomacy, his big ears, his incredible wife…he’s the whole package. I was too Republican in 2008 and 2012 to vote for him, but if given the chance again, I would.
That being said, I do partially blame him for launching our modern era of the Savior President. In both his speeches and his executive orders, he began moving away from dry, legal language and toward loaded ideological speech-making.
For example, the third paragraph of EO 13597, which Obama signed on January 13, 2012, reads,
Steady progress has been made since 2010, when my Administration launched the National Export Initiative and the Travel Promotion Act was signed into law. While our processes for moving people and goods across our borders are now both more secure and more efficient, new initiatives are needed to enable us to better capitalize on the economic opportunities presented by a dynamic 21st century travel and tourism industry.
He first gives his administration a pat on the back, then updates us on the situation using everyday language, then ends with some inspiration. It’s a mini-State-of-the-Union address.
By contrast, even when declaring a national emergency after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush kept his language dry:
A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001, and, pursuant to the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), I intend to utilize the following statutes: sections 123, 123a, 527, 2201(c), 12006, and 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 331, 359, and 367 of title 14, United States Code.
Obama, and later Trump and Biden, would have never missed such a golden opportunity to present those events in their own words. Why be matter-of-fact when you can boast, persuade, and inspire at the same time?
However, this executive flexing was more bark than bite for most of Obama’s administration, at least regarding immigration. He first tried to do things the old-fashioned way. His bipartisan 2013 “Gang of Eight” bill would have toughened border security, made it harder for employers to hire illegal migrants, and provided legal status and an eventual pathway to citizenship for millions. It passed in the Senate but failed in the House.
Mike Lee, a Republican Senator from Utah, explained the opposition nicely. He didn’t feel the bill did enough to secure the border, he worried it would cost taxpayers trillions of dollars, and he felt it was unfair to legal immigrants. But most importantly, Lee explained, the bill gave the executive branch way too much power over immigration law:
Congress would turn over almost all authority to the executive branch to secure or not secure the border, verify or not verify workplace enforcement, certify or not certify visa reforms….This bill surrenders control of immigration law to the Secretary of Homeland Security and other unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. This is a problem that permeates the federal government in general.
The irony here is almost too much. Stances like Mike Lee’s are exactly what has landed us in our current situation: control of de facto immigration law has been almost entirely surrendered to the executive branch. As we will see in the section on Trump’s second term, immigrants in 2025 find the security of their immigration status subject to the whims of Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s lawyer friends, ICE and CBP agents, and even the Texas National Guard.
As the Gang of Eight bill stagnated in the House, a great deal of passionate ink was spilled exhorting Obama to emulate Eisenhower and Kennedy and use his executive power. So he did. On public television, he summed up the problems with our immigration system, then outlined what he would do to fix it. He follows his familiar speech-making pattern:
Pat on the back: Illegal border crossings have been reduced by half since I took office. Following a brief surge in unaccompanied minor (UAC) crossings in the summer of 2014, attempted illegal crossings are back down to their lowest point since the 1970s. Resources for border enforcement have doubled since I took office. I’ve worked closely with both sides of the aisle in Congress to bring a bill to a vote, but it has not passed because some Republicans don’t like some of the things in it.
Update: Since Congress has not fulfilled its responsibility, it’s up to me to fix our broken immigration system. Eleven million undocumented immigrants are living in the United States, in the shadows. They broke the law and need to be held accountable. But also, most of them contribute to our country and are inextricably woven into our society. Deporting them all is completely unrealistic, but granting mass amnesty is not fair to those who came legally. So we will invite them to come out of the shadows, pay any taxes they owe plus a fine, and hold off on deporting them, giving them a chance to go to the back of the line to apply for legal citizenship. We will prioritize identifying, detaining, and deporting criminals.
Inspiration: We are and have always been a nation of immigrants. We want a system that is both fair and consistent with American character. Exodus 23:9 says, “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Most of Obama’s 2014 Immigration Accountability Executive Actions outlined in this speech were challenged in the courts and ultimately blocked. However, he did swap out Bush’s Secure Communities program for a Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) that directed DHS to prioritize identifying and removing dangerous criminals. This priority enforcement approach meant immigration courts more quickly closed or dismissed cases of non-criminals, essentially letting them stay in the country without legal status, in order to focus resources on criminals.
Still, regarding immigration, Obama is best remembered for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA protects from deportation certain qualifying people who arrived in the U.S. as children with their undocumented parents. This executive action took the form of a memo from Janet Napolitano, then DHS Secretary. DACA did not grant those people (nicknamed Dreamers) citizenship or permanent residency. But it declared that ICE would refrain from detaining or deporting them for the time being.
DACA was a lever Obama pulled to bring the implementation of current immigration laws more in line with his values as president. It might be like a ski resort manager who tells the lift workers not to worry about it if, every now and then, a little kid tries to ride the lift with an expired ticket. The resort hasn’t started offering free children’s lift tickets, but in practice, some kids do sometimes ride for free.
Though Obama is often cast as soft on immigration because of DACA, the data tells a different story. Deportations were high and illegal crossings were low. Cato researchers went so far as to say that “President Obama initiated and expanded a harsher immigration enforcement regime than President Bush or any other President in American history.” But when all was said and done, there were roughly the same number (11.3 million) of illegal immigrants at the end of the Obama years as there had been at the beginning.
No significant legislation had been passed in Congress. Public chatter recycled the same questions of previous decades: Amnesty or no amnesty? Who is to blame, the employers who hire illegal immigrants or the illegal immigrants themselves?
Although there had been some fuss about the summer 2014 spike in border-crossing attempts by unaccompanied minors, immigration was not top-of-mind for most voters as the presidential primaries began in 2015; Pew ranked it the twelfth public policy concern, well after terrorism, the economy, jobs, education, and social security. But that all changed when a certain real estate developer from New York burst onto the stage.
Trump 1.0: Build That Wall! (next article)
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