09/05/2017 / By JD Heyes
President Donald J. Trump is moving closer to keeping his campaign promise to end the very controversial, and wholly unconstitutional, Obama-era program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, also known as DACA — which effectively legalized hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant children brought to the U.S. by their parents.
As reported by Lifezette, there is plenty of “mainstream” media lamenting over Trump’s decision, which reportedly comes with a six-month built-in delay to give Congress time to deal with the issue in a way that does not dump on the Constitution.
For instance, on MSNBC last week, Ali Velshi, during an interview with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, said, “By definition, if you are in DACA, you can’t have committed a crime. If you committed a crime, you’re out.”
Uh, that’s not true.
As Lifezette noted further:
The DACA program, created under former President Barack Obama by means of a memo issued by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in June 2012, says that in order to be eligible for DACA, a person must have come to this country before age 16, lived here continuously for five years, been present in the country at the time the memo was issued, not have committed a felony or a “significant” misdemeanor, and not have committed “multiple misdemeanor offenses.”
This means that certainly, some percentage of the 886,000 people who’ve been approved for DACA — and have been able to live without fear of deportation and work legally in the U.S. for a two-year period — have criminal records.
And in fact, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, John Manely, tells potential DACA applicants on his website to see an attorney for a consult if they have a criminal record. He goes on to note that the federal government emphasizes it has discretion when making decisions for DACA applicants about whether they can get into the program.
In other words, under the Obama directive, one of the most politicized federal bureaucracies of all time were deciding on their own whether to discount and ignore criminal behavior for the purposes of allowing someone brought illegally into the country to stay in the country.
That discretion “basically means that [the Department of Homeland Security — DHS] can look at the totality of circumstances when analyzing a criminal record. My interpretation is that DHS can look at the underlying conduct and not merely the conviction to deny a DACA application,” Manely writes.
Continuing, he notes that “significant” misdemeanors, which may include domestic assault, would normally disqualify a person from taking advantage of the DACA program. However, a less-serious domestic battery offense, at least in California that doesn’t incorporate violence and did not result in a sentence of more than 90 days wouldn’t be considered “significant” and, therefore, would also not be a disqualifying legal hurdle for DACA acceptance.
“A battery could be the slightest bit of force or an unwanted touching. This should qualify as a non-significant misdemeanor in that it is not an offense of domestic violence and typically does not have a sentence of more than 90 days,” Manely writes, according to Lifezette.
So how many of the young adults currently in the DACA program have been allowed in despite having some kind of criminal record? The answer is, we just don’t know. (Related: GOP ‘life raft’ to Trump on DACA?)
But we do know that most DACA participants have indeed committed a number of other crimes that largely involve fraud, in order to be able to work in the U.S. — since they are not presently in the country legally and, therefore, cannot legally work here.
Lifezette reported that Ronald Mortensen of the Center for Immigration Studies writes in a March 2017 report that most DACA recipients “have committed multiple felonies in order to get jobs.” Continuing, he said they include “Social Security fraud, forgery, perjury on I-9 forms, falsification of green cards and driver’s licenses, identity theft, etc.”
But you won’t hear the mainstream media discussing that.
Trump is right to do what he promised he would do. If anyone other than Obama is at fault here, it’s the parents of the children in DACA who brought them into the country illegally in the first place.
J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.
Sources include:
Tagged Under: Congress, DACA, illegal immigrants, mainstream media, President Donald J. Trump, President Obama, repeal