A coalition of immigrant rights groups Tuesday demanded the ouster of the nation's top immigration official, charging that underlings at Immigration and Customs Enforcement were thwarting Obama administration policy by setting a quota on deportations.
"The reality is that ICE has gone rogue and needs to be reined in with dramatic action," said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Community Change. "The agency charged with enforcing the nation's immigration laws is systematically deceiving the president and the American public."
The accusations followed a weekend report in the Washington Post about a Feb. 22 memo from a top ICE official lamenting that the pace of deportations was falling behind a goal of 400,000 annually. The memo also outlined policy changes to turn around the trend.
Bhargava's group, along with several regional activist groups, called on President Obama to replace John T. Morton, the assistant secretary in charge of ICE at the Department of Homeland Security.
The activists said the agency memo was "a clear violation" of previous statements by Morton that his agency did not set deportation quotas and diverts from the administration's stated position that it would focus deportation efforts on undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes.
After the Post report, which was produced in collaboration with the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, Morton released a statement saying the memo had been "withdrawn and corrected."
The statement also said the memo was issued by another official without Morton's authorization.
"We are strongly committed to carrying out our priorities to remove serious criminal offenders first and we definitively do not set quotas," Morton said.
In Los Angeles, immigrant advocates also denounced the memo as a betrayal of promises made by the Obama administration that enforcement actions would focus on criminals and exploitative employers. Instead, they said, the majority of those being picked up are immigrants with families, jobs and no criminal backgrounds.
The administration "is choosing to deport hard-working people and destroying their families," said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
Referring to Obama, she said, "It's unacceptable, especially from someone whose father was an immigrant."
Salas said she recently received a call from a tearful woman whose husband was stopped by Long Beach police for driving a car with a broken tail light. He ended up in deportation proceedings because he had no legal status. She said such desperate calls came into her coalition's office daily.
The memo, from the head of the deportation section of ICE, noted that deportations of undocumented immigrants overall were lagging behind expectations, even though deportations of criminals were on the rise.
The memo said noncriminal removals averaged 437 a day, which would result in an annual total of 159,740 -- less than half of the 400,000 quota.
The controversy over the memo follows recent efforts by immigration activists to press the administration to make immigration a priority. The issue was put on the back burner by the White House so it could focus on the healthcare overhaul.
With the healthcare vote over, liberal groups hope to shift focus in Congress to issues such as immigration reform before the midterm elections, which have the potential to reduce sizable Democratic majorities in Congress.
Advocates of tighter immigration restrictions defended Morton, saying there was no indication in the memo that he or his agency had done anything improper.
"Obama didn't promise not to enforce the law," said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that wants immigration controls tightened. "He promised to change the law."
