New immigration policies put in place by President Obama will not only allow a staggering amount of illegal immigrants to stay in America, but the programs will also afford them “a degree of protection” from deportation.
The immigration enforcement policies introduced by the Obama administration in November 2014 would take the focus off of the estimated 9.6 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the country and instead make criminals and those who recently crossed the border illegally priorities for deportation, according to a report published Thursday by the Migration Policy Institute.
The new Obama administration policies, which went into effect July 1, will likely result in a massive drop — up to 25,000 — in the number of illegal immigrants deported each year. From 2011 to 2014 the number of deportations fell from about 200,000 to about 100,000.
“The projected decline in interior removals results from the fact that the enforcement priorities are defined narrowly, so that about 87 percent of unauthorized immigrants in the United States as of 2015 likely fall outside of all three priority categories,” the report reads.
The top three priority categories under the new enforcement guidelines include national security threats, gang members and convicted felons. Under the Priority Enforcement Program, federal agents ask local police to notify them if an illegal immigrant is arrested and fits one of those categories.
Some sanctuary cities, though, like San Francisco, where a woman was fatally shot by an illegal immigrant who had previously been deported five times, refuse to report these arrests to the federal agencies.
Three states, the District of Columbia and around 350 cities and counties have passed laws to limit cooperation with federal immigration agents. These sanctuary cities, according to the report, are home to 5.9 million, or about 53 percent, of the illegal immigrant population in the United States. (RELATED: Hundreds Of Released Criminal Immigrants Committed Crimes Again)
According to the report, federal agents will now target the estimated 690,000 illegal immigrants who have been convicted of a felony, the 640,000 who came to America illegally since Jan. 1, 2014 and the 60,000 fugitives who failed to self-deport after being ordered to do so by an immigration court.
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