Who is Obama’s Immigration Police Deporting?

One of Obama’s worst policies has been his aggressive deportation efforts. No president has deported more undocumented immigrants. Most of these people do nothing but benefit the United States. For instance, Lesly Sophia Cortez-Martinez.

A 32-year-old undocumented mother, who was granted temporary deportation reprieve under President Obama’s 2012 executive action known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, was deported to Mexico after she tried to reenter the country legally with an immigration document allowing her to travel abroad to visit an ailing family member.

Lesly Sophia Cortez-Martinez, who has three young U.S. citizen children, was on her way back from Mexico through the Chicago O’Hare International Airport this week when Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents prevented her from leaving the airport. As a DACA beneficiary, Cortez-Martinez was allowed to apply for advance parole, which allows some immigrants to travel out of and reenter the United States under certain circumstances for education, business, or a death in the family.

As Cortez-Martinez reentered the United States on Monday night, however, agents saw in the immigration system that she had a prior deportation removal order from 2004. According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website, the government cannot issue an advance parole document if an applicant is “in exclusion, deportation, removal, or rescission proceedings.”

Cortez-Martinez insisted that she didn’t know about the old removal order, explaining that she went to Mexico for a death in the family and returned to the U.S. without documents, her lawyer Mony Ruiz-Velasco explained to ThinkProgress a day before Cortez-Martinez was deported.

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Since he took office, President Obama has insisted that his administration would go after “felons, not families,” a refrain based on the idea that immigration officials would dedicate federal resources to prioritizing the detention and deportation of immigrants with criminal violations, rather than undocumented children or parents with long-standing U.S. ties. Obama’s DACA initiative has also helped divert federal resources to pass over undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as young children and have since maintained clean records.

But according to Tania Unzueta, the policy director at the immigrant advocacy group Not1More Campaign, Cortez-Martinez’s case proves that’s not always the case. Cortez-Martinez has three U.S.-citizen children and doesn’t have a criminal record, two qualities that the Obama administration has asked immigration officials to consider before taking people into deportation proceedings.

“The president keeps talking about going after people who are dangerous, and yet we know the people who are actually considered priority [cases] by Border Patrol and by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agencies are members of our community, like Lesly,” Unzueta told ThinkProgress.

Obama has been quite inconsistent throughout his tenure on undocumented immigrants, often implementing policies that both give undocumented immigrants breathing room on one hand while cracking down and deporting on the other. Obviously, the president would have liked to have signed an immigration bill during his term and of course that it didn’t happen is not his fault, unless you think it is what he should have spent his political capital on in 2009 instead of health care. But that doesn’t mean he’s been a good president on treating immigrants as useful and welcome Americans.