had once sponsored a reform bill with Ted Kennedy—would no longer touch the issue. After House moderates cast a tough vote to narrowly pass a climate change bill that never went anywhere in the Senate, Speaker Nancy Pelosi realized that she could not ask her caucus to repeat this pattern and agreed with Senate leader Harry Reid that action on immigration reform had to begin there. In light of the Republicans’ strategy of filibustering everything they opposed, this meant that all sixty Democrats might be needed to pass immigration reform. This was a highly unlikely event, as some conservative Democrats always opposed reform and success had long depended on at least some Republican support. (Even the modest reforms President George W. Bush had supported would have been impossible in the fall 2009 political climate.)
Meanwhile, President Obama was missing in action. And immigrant rights groups allowed him to stay missing. They engaged in no public protest over his failure to follow through on immigrant rights. After losing political momentum by subsuming their political timetable to the president’s, activists had a golden opportunity with the October 13 nationwide rallies to force Obama to at least explain why his administration was increasing enforcement and deportations without doing anything to mitigate the harm such actions did to undocumented immigrants. Instead, the rallies created a misleading impression of progress toward reform, reducing rather than increasing pressure on the president.
In addition to giving Obama a pass on comprehensive reform, leading immigrant rights groups also failed to publicly demand that Obama take administrative actions that did not require congressional approval. For example, he could have used his executive power to protect students who would qualify under the DREAM Act bill. First introduced in 2001, this measure offered a path to citizenship to undocumented young people who graduate from U.S. high schools and then complete two years in the military or two years at a four-year institution of higher learning. Obama could also have declared a moratorium on deportations that break up families or do not involve serious criminal conduct (he did the latter in 2011).
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