IMMIGRANTS’ ADVOCATES VOICE JOY, THANKS FOR PRESIDENT’S ACTIONS ON IMMIGRATION AS CONSERVATIVES DENOUNCE THE CHANGES

By Miriam Raftery

November 23, 2014 (San Diego) – Families who no longer need to live in fear of separation or deportation have much to be thankful for following President Barack Obama’s immigration reforms announced last week. Locally, immigration activists are sharing their reactions, including Border Angels founder Enrique Morones, who was with President Obama during his historic executive action speech at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas.

“It was wonderful to join old friends that have fought and continue to be with us in the struggle for humane immigration policies, and as we discussed, we still have a long ways to go,” Morones wrote in a letter thanking supporters.  “As I told President Obama, `Gracias, this executive action is why many of us voted for you,” Morones added. “We have much more work to do, more to be included, Si Se Puede!’”

Following the President’s executive action, Border Angels is holding meetings with immigration attorneys on Tuesdays at 6 p.m. at the Border Angels office (2258 Island Ave., San Diego) to counsel immigrants on their rights.  Also this week they plan to deliver  Thanksgiving meals to day laborers. The group also continues collecting winter clothes, food, water, sleeping bags, support and host families to assist arriving refugee families.

After returning from Las Vegas, Morones went to Friendship park and met a family that had been separated for 18 years and another that met their grandchildren for the first time. (photo, left)

“The 24 hours ended in celebration as we were able pick up a Guatemalan Refugee Family (mother and three small children) from detention and arrange for them to travel to join father in another part of the country,” he said, providing a photo showing the joy on the face of one of those children, a 6-year-old boy, as he spoke with his father on the phone.  (photo, right)

Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) tweeted on Twitter that said she applauds the President “{for recognizing how vital immigrants are to [California’s] economy, culture, society.”

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzales (D-San Diego)  said the President’s actions will help millions of hardworking and otherwise law-abiding immigrants in our communities “come out of the shadows o work, pay taxes and raise families without fear of deportation.” She adds, “I am proud our president is taking this very crucial first step, but this doesn’t relieve the Republicans in Congress from their responsibility to act in the long term.”

But Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Vista) denounced the president’s “unilateral actions on immigration” calling the  President’s announcement “a violation of his responsibilities and the trust the American people have placed in him…The president is not respecting our system of checks and balances –we cannot let this stand,”  City News Service reported.

Similarly Rob Luton with San Diego Secure Border Coalition has said he thinks the President’s plan is “flawed” and that Obama overstepped his executive authority.

Countering those claims, Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) points out that Republicans in Congress never expressed such outrage when President Ronald Reagan legalized 3 million immigrants in 1986 or when President George H.W. Bush took unilateral action to halt deportations of over 1.5 million people.  She called’s Bush’s Family Fairness policy, an executive action like Obama’s, “sweeping,” adding, “It affected more than 40 percent of the undocumented population in the United States at the time.” President Bush Sr. “thought big,” Boxer recalls, adding that Obama, too “should think big.”