Obama Is Deporting More Immigrants Than Ever

Huffingtonpost:

A little girl became the face of the nation's immigration debate on Wednesday, when she told First Lady Michelle Obama about her mother's fear.

"My mom ... she says that Barack Obama is taking everybody away that doesn't have papers," the second-grader said after being called on by the first lady, who was visiting a suburban Maryland school with Mexico's First Lady Margarita Zavala.

And when Michele Obama replied by describing the need to make sure "that people can be here with the right kind of papers," the girl simply responded quietly: "But my mom doesn't have any." (Watch the video below.)

The girl's guilelessness and innocence, in contrast to the inchoate rage of the anti-immigrant movement -- and even to the first lady's suddenly hollow-sounding talking points -- could well turn her into an icon as immigration makes its way to the front of the national agenda.

But surely she was wrong, in suggesting that President Obama is a particular danger to undocumented immigrants? Perhaps she was confusing him with the governor of Arizona or something?

Well, actually, it turns out the little girl was right. Obama's Department of Homeland Security has been deporting more undocumented immigrants than President Bush's ever did.

The number of deportations each year more than tripled during the Bush era -- and has kept going up since then. During fiscal year 2009, the first fiscal year of the Obama era, 387,790 immigrants were deported -- almost 100,000 more during the last full fiscal year of the Bush presidency.

Posted via email from Jim Nichols