NHCLC Applauds President Obama’s Deportation Policy That Protects the Innocent

Samuel Rodriguez President of The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference Applauds President Obama’s Deportation Policy That Protects the Innocent

SACRAMENTO, Calif.–In a surprising move yesterday, President Obama signed into law a new immigration deportation policy that is causing quite a stir within both the conservative and liberal parties. The Obama administration said Thursday its top priority will be targeting undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions for deportation.

Under the new plan there will be case-by-case reviews of the approximately 300,000 undocumented immigrants who are facing expulsion in an effort to remove low-priority cases from the deportation pipeline and place the focus on those with criminal convictions. Those who are low priorities for deportation — such as young people who were brought to the U.S. as children, military veterans and spouses of military personnel — will no longer be targeted and may have the opportunity to apply for a work permit.

Last year, the Obama administration deported nearly 400,000 people — a record number —and this rising number of deportations has angered and frustrated the Hispanic community. It has broken up families and resulted in the deportation of many who have been “in line” waiting for their case to be reviewed in order to “legalize” their citizenship. Of the 393,000 deported, fewer than half of those were convicted criminals.

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the NHCLC (www.nhclc.org), also known as the Hispanic Evangelical Association, the nation's largest Christian Hispanic organization, representing millions of Hispanic constituents, said, “I commend and applaud President Obama for making such an American, and at the heart of the matter, Christian decision — to protect the innocent, the Hispanic youth who were born in America or came to the United States at a young age and who represent the future of America.” Rodriguez concluded, “Anything that protects the innocent is truly the heart of God.”

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — a major advocate for the DREAM Act, which would create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — said the new process will stop almost all deportations of people that his legislation is designed to protect.

“We need to be doing all we can to keep these talented, dedicated, American students here, not wasting increasingly precious resources sending them away to countries they barely remember,” Durbin said in a statement. “The Administration’s new process is a fair and just way to deal with an important group of immigrant students and I will closely monitor DHS to ensure it is fully implemented.”

“They will be applying common sense guidelines to make these decisions, like a person’s ties and contributions to the community, their family relationships and military service record,” White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Muñoz wrote on the White House Blog. “In the end, this means more immigration enforcement pressure where it counts the most, and less where it doesn’t – that’s the smartest way to follow the law while we stay focused on working with the Congress to fix it.”

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez recently met with Governor Sam Brownback of Kansas and will be meeting with Republican Governors in order to offer the Just Integration Strategy as a practical solution to the immigration issue. Rodriguez presented the integration strategy in a meeting with President Obama one year ago. This year, the President incorporated Rev. Rodriguez’s verbiage in his recent presentations on immigration. The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference calls for a Just Integration Strategy that reconciles Leviticus 19 and Romans 13; compassion with the rule of law.

The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference is the Hispanic National Association of Evangelicals unifying, serving and representing the Hispanic Born Again Community via 34,200 member churches and 20 million constituents by reconciling the vertical and horizontal of the Christian message through the 7 Directives of Life, Family, Great Commission, Stewardship, Justice, Education and Youth.

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TO BOOK an INTERVIEW or SPEAKING ENGAGEMENT with REV. SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ Contact Matti Stevenson • 719.360.0586 • matti@mattimediagroup.com