All In The President's Illegal Family
Leadership: With two relatives having successfully defied deportation orders, President Obama needs to explain once again his relaxation and disregard of the immigration laws he swore to uphold and enforce.
We are great believers in individual responsibility, and certainly other presidents have had relatives with less-than-stellar reputations. Jimmy Carter had his brother Billy, and Bill Clinton had his brother Roger.
They were responsible for their own actions and idiosyncrasies. But presidents are responsible for upholding the nation's laws, even if they are violated by presidential relatives.
On Aug. 24, President Obama's uncle Omar Onyango was arrested by Framingham, Mass., police for driving under the influence of alcohol, running his SUV through a stop sign, narrowly avoiding a police cruiser and — a tragedy repeated too often these days — averting the killing of American citizens by illegal aliens who should not be here.
We pause to ask how it is possible for Onyango to have resided illegally in the U.S. for decades and, after being ordered deported in 1982, to have secured a job, a Massachusetts driver's license and a federal Social Security number, all without being detected or apprehended by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Supporters of open borders say Onyango was working, paying his taxes and contributing to society. Yes, he had a job, something 14 million American citizens who were not ordered deported by a judge in a court of law do not have. He should not have been here. Neither should the millions like him.
Onyango may have benefited from the policies of former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, whose administration assigned illegal aliens identification numbers that looked similar to Social Security numbers.
A 1989 Associated Press story with the headline "Mass. Aliens Given Fake Social Security Numbers" explained the process.
The practice started after Dukakis issued a 1985 executive order barring state agencies from asking people applying for state services about their immigration status. Sound familiar? The Obama administration is at war with Arizona over allowing its police to ask suspects the same question.
Onyango's arrest and detention come shortly after Obama through his Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced a "case by case" evaluation policy under which the deportation of those illegal aliens who posed no discernible threat and had no criminal record would not happen if certain administration-defined criteria were met.
Under this administrative amnesty, announced just before Obama left for the privileged confines of Martha's Vineyard to conjure up a to-be-announced economic plan, illegal aliens such as Onyango would likely get to stay as "low priority" offenders with "family ties" in the U.S.
Onyango's sister and the president's aunt, Zeituni Onyango, was first ordered deported in 2004 after overstaying a visa issued in 2000. She had been discovered living in public housing that supposedly was available only to U.S. citizens and fraudulently collecting $700 in monthly disability checks. Incredibly, a Boston federal judge stayed her deportation order, and in 2010 she was granted political asylum.
"There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been ordered deported and just ran off and nobody's looking for them," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Even if found, some 300,000 of them likely will get to stay, thanks to Obama's stealth amnesty policies.
This goes beyond a personal embarrassment to the president. It underscores all that's wrong with an immigration enforcement policy in which enforcement is not the operative word. It's a policy that's just been made less strict, if that is possible.
Before anyone says, "Yeah, but we're a nation of immigrants," we need to remember that we are first and foremost a nation of laws — laws that need to be faithfully executed and enforced and not evaded or eviscerated by executive order.