According to president Barack Obama, he backs an immigration reform and announced last month an initiative to ease deportation policies, but he has ousted 1,000,000 illegal immigrants in two and a half years. If the Administrations keeps up this pace, Obama will deport more people in one term than George W. Bush did in two.

This contradiction between rhetoric and reality is a key element of debate over U.S. immigration policy, and stakes are high for the next presidential election, having in mind that in 2008, 67% of Hispanics voted for Obama over Republican candidates.

But Obama fell short on his promise to have a comprehensive reform bill in Congress in his first year. And despite his push of the DREAM Act in 2010, that bill failed in the Senate at the end of the Democrat-run 111th Congress.

Clarissa Martinez de Castro, Director of Immigration and National Campaigns for the National Council of La Raza, said because Congress is unlikely to consider immigration reform any time soon, “It has to stay there front and center and in the face of folks that are allowing this issue to fester.”

The Administration announced its initiative August 18, a step some analysts say gave up on an uncooperative Congress and aimed to appease advocates of more liberal immigration laws.

Some 11.2 million illegal immigrants live and work in the United States today, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The initiative is expected to help an estimated two million young people who under the stalled DREAM could have achieved citizenship by pursuing higher education or military service.

Under the move, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice will review and clear out low-priority cases from 300,000 backlogged deportation proceedings.

Continued focus of immigration enforcement on those with criminal records would effectively leave alone those who came at a young age and have spent years in the United States.

Republican critics say directing immigration authorities to use prosecutorial discretion to administratively implement such changes ignores Congress and existing federal law.

A June 17 memo by U.S. ICE Director John Morton defined prosecutorial discretion as an agency’s authority “to decide to what degree to enforce the law against a particular individual.”

The memo “reiterated and clarified” the priorities on which the new initiative is based, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano wrote August 18 on behalf of Obama in a letter to 21 senators.

An ICE official who declined to be named said, “We have limited resources and if their best use in protecting the American public means exercising discretion, then that’s what we’re going to do.”

In fiscal year 2010, the last full year of data, ICE removed nearly 393,000 undocumented immigrants — a record, and almost 24,000 more than in FY2008, Bush’s last full fiscal year in office.

Source: Reuters.