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For the first few years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the White House persuaded immigration activists to hold their fire. The incoming Obama team had to first rebuild the economy and make sure Detroit’s automakers didn’t shutter after the 2008 financial meltdown. Then came a massive healthcare reboot. Then Supreme Court nominations, a Republican takeover of Congress, and the President’s own re-election.
And then. And then. And then. There always seemed to be something keeping immigration from the frontburner. By 2014, long-simmering frustrations among immigration-rights advocates were ready to boil over and at the annual opening gala of the National Council on La Raza, as the umbrella group of advocacy and social services group now known as UnidosUS was called at the time, Obama himself was targeted for blame. “Deporter in chief” burned, especially coming from the head of one of the largest Latino organizations in the country whose alumni had embedded throughout the Obama Administration.
It clearly hurt the President, who had won re-election in 2012 with the backing of 71% of the Hispanic vote despite activists’ already deep frustrations with his first-term inaction. Two days after the gala, Obama took up his own defense: “I think the community understands I got their back and I’m fighting for them.” And a few months later, Obama rolled out expanded executive actions that—had the Supreme Court not curbed his powers—would have expanded protections to almost 5 million undocumented immigrants. During his last year in office, deportations fell to the lowest levels since 2007.
But the bell had been rung. Distrust was an open characteristic of the White…
Source : time
