Spring 2014 National Immigrant Solidarity Network Monthly News Alert! (tags)
The Obama Administration’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget proposal is of two minds about how to deal with the broken U.S. immigration system. On the one hand, the document calls for the creation of “a pathway to earned citizenship for hardworking men and women” who are in the United States without legal status. On the other hand, the budget would continue to devote significant sums of money to the detention and deportation of many of the same people for whom the administration would like to create a path to citizenship. In other words, the administration pledges that it will do its best to deport from the country the very same people it wants to help stay. While the budget underscores how we'll benefit from commonsense immigration reform by accounting for savings the Congressional Budget Office has forecast, it continues our dysfunctional and illogical immigration detention system. As in past years, the budget includes billions of dollars for the detention operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — part of the Department of Homeland Security — including funding for 30,539 detention beds....