By Matt O’Brien
mattobrien@bayareanewsgroup.com
OAKLAND — Reflecting growing liberal frustration with President Barack Obama’s lack of progress on immigration reform, a Democratic congressman from his home state of Illinois is barnstorming through the Bay Area this week to demand the administration slow down its record-high number of deportations.
“He’s our champion,” said U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who lands in the Bay Area on Tuesday. “He’s the one we want to support. But there’s a community of people he made a promise and commitment to, and we want him to keep it.”
Obama continues to get high popularity ratings from Latinos and most immigrant groups, but Gutierrez is among a growing chorus of immigrant advocates who have expressed waning enthusiasm as the president launches his re-election campaign.
Gutierrez will visit Redwood City, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco and St. Helena on a three-day tour of the region, part of a national campaign called “Change Takes Courage” that is aimed at pressuring Obama to act urgently on immigration matters.
With little chance of immigrant-friendly legislation getting through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Gutierrez said Obama should use his executive power to provide the relief he promised immigrant families during the 2008 presidential campaign.
“The president of the United States decided one morning that there was genocide in Libya and he was going to take the side of Libya and that they needed our help,” Gutierrez said. “He didn’t ask the Congress. He didn’t hold a meeting. He used the discretion he has.”
He can use that same executive discretion to stop detaining undocumented young people and other vulnerable groups, said Gutierrez, who chairs the immigration task force of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The Obama administration deported a record-high 392,862 illegal immigrants in the 2010 fiscal year, and another 387,790, the previous record, in 2009.
The administration has prioritized arresting and deporting people who have criminal records, using a program called Secure Communities that finds undocumented immigrants once they are fingerprinted at local jails. All of California’s counties are now part of the database. Advocates point out that tens of thousands of people without criminal records are also caught in the net.
Twenty-two Democratic senators, including California Sens. Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, wrote Obama a letter on April 13 asking him to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” to defer the deportation of undocumented students.
The letter was a response to last year’s congressional defeat of the Dream Act, a bill that would have provided a path to citizenship to immigrants brought to the United States illegally before they were 16 and who graduate from high school and pursue college or military service. The House of Representatives approved the bill in December but the bill failed to get a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Immigration officials sometimes defer deportations on a case-by-case basis, but the senators said they wanted an executive action that would help “all young people” who meet the Dream Act’s rigorous requirements. Opponents have described such a move as “backdoor amnesty” that ignores the will of Congress.
Obama has made recent statements to Spanish media that immigration reform remains a priority for his presidency. He met with prominent business and law enforcement leaders and moderates in a White House meeting about immigration on April 19. The meeting featured several Californians, including former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and the Los Angeles City Council president. Activists on both sides of the fierce immigration debate complained they were not at the table.
A readout of the meeting said Obama made it clear that “the only way to fix what’s broken about our immigration system is through legislative action in Congress.”
Gutierrez acknowledges that Obama lent his support to immigration legislation last year, especially the Dream Act, but said he “could have made it a bigger priority.” Now, he said, “That happened. It’s history,” and the only possible relief to many immigrant families is direct action from the president.
Gutierrez made a similar visit to the Bay Area two years ago, stopping at a San Francisco church and using the podium — which he shared with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — to draw attention to the plight of immigrant families affected by deportations. This time, he is visiting about 20 cities throughout the country.
“We’ve broadened the scope,” Gutierrez said. “It’s not because I got better at doing this. It’s because the community is better organized and the pain, the fear, the anger, the disillusionment, is broad.”
On Thursday, Gutierrez will stop at St. Helena Church in Napa County before visiting the Cesar Chavez Education Center in East Oakland. Congress is on spring break this week.
Napa County vintner Rosaura Segura said she is glad for the Illinois politician’s visit because she does not think her own local repsrentatives, or Obama, are taking charge of the issue.
“It’s unfortunate that under his presidency there have been more deportations than Bush or the previous presidencies,” said Segura, a wine producer and chairwoman of the Napa Valley Migrant Farmworker Housing Committee. “The Hispanic community is such that, we’re very loyal people, but we voted for a reason. He made a lot of promises.”
