Apparently, it is incorrect to assume that the open-border crowd supports the deportation of even so-called "high priority" illegal aliens.
Amid the debate over which aliens should constitute a high priority for deportation under the Obama amnesty, and which should be permitted to stay and given more opportunities to cause crime before becoming a priority, amnesty advocates have begun to question the deportation even of aliens convicted of violent crimes.
Michelle Fei, co-director of the Immigrant Defense Project and member of the New York State Working Group Against Deportation, explains that illegal aliens "with criminal convictions still belong with their families and communities, no matter what." Of course, illegal aliens are not part of the American community, having never been formally admitted to the United States. But public safety is not a concern of Ms. Fei and her allies, which is not surprising: her coalition persuaded New York to pull out of Secure Communities and, in her words, "has vociferously called for the protection of all immigrants, not just those who can be deemed innocent or low priority" and "continue[s] to firmly object to the targeting of people with criminal convictions." Her group's call for "protection" is actually a call for non-enforcement of immigration laws even against criminal aliens — in other words, complete abolishment of immigration law and sovereignty.
Fei provides an example of the type of alien her group wants to see spared from deportation: her friend, an immigrant from Guyana who was convicted of armed robbery and recently deported home. She laments:
In the weeks and months and years to come, more and more people like him will get thrown into the deportation machinery, as few object to – and many applaud – ICE's new policy rather than question why our country so quickly resorts to deporting immigrants who make the same mistakes we all do.
Who knew that armed robbery was such a common mistake?
According to Fei's website, the Immigrant Defense Project "has received generous past and current support from Funding Exchange, New York Community Trust, New York Foundation, Open Society Institute (including The Gideon Project), Ford Foundation, JEHT Foundation, and private individual donors."
The group is anti-Secure Communities, pro-amnesty, anti-deportation, and considers groups which applaud Obama's administrative amnesty, like La Raza and the ACLU, to be too pro-enforcement. It doesn't much get more open-border than that!
