For over a year now undocumented and grassroots immigrant rights organizers have been leading the call for President Obama to take unilateral action against deportations. It started with a simple request: while Congress debated immigration reform, the President had to place a moratorium on deportations. As months passed with no signs of traction for humane immigration legislation, we stepped up our efforts, and took our call to the next level: after two million deportations, the President not only had a moral obligation to stop deportations, but he also needed to expand the administrative Deferred Action program that allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrant youth to live without fear of deportation and work outside the shadows. Although our demands were just, backed by legal precedent, and entirely justified after years of sustained attacks on our community, one of the biggest obstacles we faced came from the very D.C. based immigration advocates who take pride in calling the president Deporter-in-Chief now that we made it politically safe for them to do so. In fact, it was just a few months ago that we were chastised by D.C. advocates for, in their view, helping Republicans by holding President Obama accountable, and ruining their chance to score a win in Congress regardless of the detrimental consequences proposed immigration legislation meant for our community. The fact is that our vision was and continues to be bigger than the cheap politics played by out of touch Beltway advocates that often behave as a branch of the Democratic Party, instead of true allies to the undocumented community. With this clear history of unwillingness to lead by taking politically risky positions, and of siding with the political interests over working class immigrant communities, I call on America’s Voice, the National Council of la Raza, the National Immigration Forum, the Center for American Progress, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and all those other advocates who were unwilling to take a stand against deportations when it was most critical for them to do so, to step aside and boycott all further White House meetings until President Obama sits down with and negotiates with the undocumented immigrant day laborers, trans and queer organizers, parents, and youth who brought the proposal of Administrative Relief to the public consciousness when everyone said we should be quiet. latinorebels/2014/07/25/undocumented-people-must-be-at-negotiation-table-to-achieve-substantive-relief/
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 20:01:09 +0000
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