Legal News

Will Obama?s Policies on Illegal Immigration Trigger a ?Bloodbath??

By Nathan Koppel

The immigration legal community has been watching anxiously for clues about whether Obama will back off his predecessor's aggressive prosecution of illegal immigration.

Well, wait no more, esquires. The White House has announced that it plans to push ahead with an Obama campaign promise to reform immigration law so that illegal immigrants in the country can become citizens, according to an article today in the Houston Chronicle.

Immigration advocates, predictably, are excited about such an amnesty program and are laying the groundwork for pro-reform rallies in major U.S. cities, the Chron reports.

Pat Buchanan, on the other hand, recently told MSNBC that there will be a "bloodbath" if Obama pushes to legalize the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. at the same time so many citizens are out of work.

In its May issue, Corporate Counsel covers another important facet of the immigration debate: workplace raids. The magazine provides a detailed profile of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service ─ the federal agency, known as ICE, that got so much attention under Bush for aggressively (and secretively) rounding up illegal aliens and fining the companies that employed them.

But there are signs that Obama may have lost some appetite for workplace raids, Corporate Counsel reports, in this accompanying article. After ICE raided a work site in February ─ the first raid under Obama ─ Janet Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, *(top, left) demanded a review of all work site enforcement.

She ordered the review, according to a Homeland spokeswoman, because ICE agents had not cleared the raid with their D.C. bosses. "Hopefully, [Obama] will call a moratorium on workplace raids and then work on complete immigration reform," Fordham law prof. Jennifer Gordon told the magazine.

Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, there's an interesting story today about a difficult custody issue that has arisen in the wake of workplace raids.

Many workers jailed as a result of ICE raids are at risk of losing custody of their American-born children. A Missouri judge, for example, ruled that a jailed Guatemalan woman had abandoned her child, who was adopted by a Missouri couple. The woman has filed suit in an attempt to retain custody of her two-year-old son.

Cases like this one, the Times reports, are "popping up across the country as crackdowns against illegal immigrants thrust local courts into transnational custody battles and leave thousands of children in limbo."

Photos: Getty Images

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 23, 2009 (boomark / email).