President Barack Obama’s former Secretary of Homeland Security debunked the notion pushed by pro-amnesty advocates that Obama is the “deporter in chief” because his administration has been “overzealous” in deporting illegal immigrants.
In an interview with Conan Nolan of NBC Los Angeles on Sunday, Janet Napolitano, who is now the president of the University of California system, was asked whether criticism of her from the left that she was “overzealous in the deportation of undocumented immigrants” was unfair.
“I think it was, actually,” Napolitano said. “It didn’t look at the whole picture. A lot of those deportations were individuals who were captured right at the border so they had not yet entered the United States.”
Napolitano then said, “because of the way we handled them differently than prior administrations, they got counted differently.”
She also said the Obama administration, for the first time, “instituted priorities in terms of deportations” which “had never been done before.”
Napolitano said that criticism of “overzealous deportations” overlooks the fact that the Obama administration, through executive fiat, enacted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that allowed illegal immigrant DREAMers who came to the country before they were 16 years of age, are under 30, and meet other requirements to receive temporary amnesty and work permits.
[…]
