Eva Longoria was Misled by the President

Eva Longoria was among several Latino/a celebrities that President Obama recently spoke to about immigration reform. Ms. Longoria emerged from the meeting defending the President’s decision to not act administratively to, for example, provide deferred action for DREAM Act students. In this piece Julianne Hing of Colorlines writes an open letter to Ms. Longoria:

 
Hi Eva, I hope it’s okay that I address you by your first name.

We’re big fans of you over here at Colorlines. There are some very committed Desperate Housewives fans on staff, but I think I started following your political work after I heard you were going back to school to get your master’s in Chicano Studies at CSU Northridge. (Yay, public education!) And you won me over when you came out in support of the DREAM Act. You use your celebrity for good, and are community-minded, too.

But, okay, enough gushing. The real reason I’m writing is to let you know you’re being lied to. Well, you and the dozen other Latina and Latino celebrities including America Ferrera, Emilio Estefan and Rosario Dawson who were at the recent White House meeting to discuss, according to the White House, “the importance of fixing the broken immigration system … so that America can win the future.”

President Obama’s been getting a bunch of heat recently from immigrant rights groups, and even members of Congress, who are demanding that he use his executive authority to halt the deportation of certain groups, including DREAM Act-eligible youth. The DREAM Act would allow undocumented youth who’ve grown up in the country to eventually become eligible for citizenship if they cleared a long list of hurdles and committed two years to the military or education. Obama’s administration heartily supported it; his education, labor, homeland security and defense secretaries—even his agriculture secretary!—all made strong public statements announcing their unequivocal support of the bill when it was being debated in Congress last December. But after it failed, Obama’s kept on deporting would-be beneficiaries anyway.

He was even confronted earlier this year during a Univision-hosted town hall by Karen Maldonado, a young undocumented immigrant who held her deportation order up to her Web cam and asked Obama why he was still dispensing them to undocumented immigrant youth, who want to put their education to work for the country and stay in the only home many have ever known.

“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that,” he told Maldonado, insisting as he has ever since becoming president that he would not act without Congress. “That’s part of my job.”

I suspect he told you the same thing, too, Eva, because after your meeting last week you told CNN something very similar.

“We like to blame Obama for the inaction, but he can’t just disobey the law that’s written,” you said, urging Latinos who were angry about things to vote.

Here’s what the White House didn’t tell you. President Obama does have the executive authority to stop the deportation of certain classes of immigrants who would otherwise be deportable; he’s just refusing to use that authority. Maybe he’s worried about political backlash from the right. Maybe he figures he has enough political capital with the left to keep denying his own power. But either way he’s being pretty cowardly about things. The worst part, in my opinion, are the bald-faced lies. Not just to you, but to the rest of the country, to the nation’s immigrant youth. Read more….

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