Obama and Ted Kennedy’s Amnesty Guy Is In Charge of DHS Data On Illegal Immigration
Patrick Howley
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In a stunning turn of events, President Obama and Ted Kennedy’s point man on immigration is currently in charge of illegal immigrant data for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The man who controls statistics for ICE, the enforcement subdivision of DHS, has argued in favor of Obama’s amnesty policies and testified that deportations cause psychological damage to immigrant communities and perpetuate racial profiling.
Marc Rosenblum is deputy assistant secretary of the office of immigration statistics at the Department of Homeland Security. He has served in this role since January 2016. Insiders in Washington believe that Trump is being undermined from within DHS by Rosenblum as he battles Congress and the rogue state of California on immigration enforcement.
Rosenblum has advised President Obama on immigration and has argued in favor of Obama’s amnesty, calling the United States a “nation of nations” on one panel.
Here is a segment from Rosenblum’s bio at the Migration Policy Institute:
“Dr. Rosenblum was a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow detailed to the office of U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy during the 2006 Senate immigration debate and was involved in crafting the Senate’s immigration legislation in 2006 and 2007. He also served as a member of President-elect Obama’s Immigration Policy Transition Team in 2009. From 2011-13, he served on the National Research Council’s Committee on Estimating Costs to the Department of Justice of Increased Border Security Enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security.”
The Senate’s 2006 immigration legislation included a bill that pushed for amnesty for illegal immigrants and a new “blue card” program to bring in more guest workers to the United States, but it failed to pass. The 2007 immigration legislation pushed for by Ted Kennedy and McCain also tried to install amnesties.
Senator Ted Kennedy, of course, was largely credited with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which largely kicked off the mass immigration the United States has seen in intervening decades.
Insiders believe that Rosenblum could have “burrowed in” from a political to a career post at ICE in 2016.
“Even with clearly articulated enforcement priorities, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confronts a number of tradeoffs in designing an overall interior enforcement strategy. Most importantly, there is a fundamental tradeoff between the quality and quantity of deportations. Policymakers must choose between maximizing the volume of deportations and ensuring that deportations focus on the highest-priority cases. Additional tradeoffs involve balancing additional deportations through aggressive interior enforcement against the potential harm to community trust and public safety, the well-being of immigrant communities, and the civil and constitutional rights of immigrants and citizens.”
“Given these challenges and finite resources available for immigration enforcement, both Congress and the president have always set enforcement priorities, even though they have not always been public or specific. And because of the unauthorized population’s integration within U.S. communities, Congress and the president also have long identified certain otherwise-deportable immigrants who may be eligible for relief from removal or similar immigration benefits.”
Interior enforcement can have far-reaching and long-term effects on deportees’ families, employers, and the broader communities in which immigrants live. An estimated 20 to 25 percent of deportees are parents of U.S.-citizen children; children and U.S. spouses and partners who are left behind following a parent’s deportation suffer a wide range of negative behavioral and emotional outcomes, financial hardship, and housing instability, as well as declines in school performance, among other adverse effects.51 On one level, these adverse impacts are an inevitable byproduct of interior enforcement (as well as border enforcement targeting returning immigrants) given the deeply integrated U.S. unauthorized population. As Doris Meissner and I have argued elsewhere, “The deportation dilemma is that more humane enforcement is fundamentally in tension with
stricter immigration control. A robust enforcement system inevitably inflicts damage on established families and communities.”
The social and psychological costs of enforcement also depend on where and how enforcement occurs. Numerous studies have found that large-scale raids at worksites and other public locations push whole immigrant communities underground. Raids at immigrants’ houses (for instance by NFOP teams) can have a particularly damaging impact on spouses and children, particularly when the children witness the arrest of a parent. And cooperation between ICE and local LEAs through traffic stops has been widely found to discourage immigrants from driving, threatening livelihoods. Significant enforcement efforts can spread fear throughout immigrant communities, even among families and children that are not directly affected by detention or deportation. In
addition, two-thirds of unauthorized immigrants are employed. Deportations disrupt U.S. labor markets and reduce job creation by U.S. firms. By one estimate, deporting all 11 million unauthorized immigrants would cut the U.S. workforce by 6.4 percent and reduce U.S. real GDP by $1.6 trillion (5.7 percent).”
“Interior immigration enforcement raises special civil liberties concerns because immigration violations are generally civil (i.e., non-criminal) offenses, but immigration enforcement relies on extensive police-like powers. Noncitizens may be forcibly detained in jail-like settings, cut off from their livelihoods, and permanently separated from their homes and families—all without the benefit of legal representation. Guarding against civil-rights violations also merits special attention because 96 percent of people removed from the United States between 2004 and 2013 were Latin American or Caribbean—a number that far exceeds these regions’ share of the unauthorized population (79 percent), and which is consistent with a broader history of racial profiling and law
enforcement discrimination against Americans of Hispanic or Black descent.”
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