Ted Poe: “It has recently come to light that, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of…”

“It has recently come to light that, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Department of Homeland Security granted deferred action to over 12,000 illegal aliens in FY 2010. ``Deferred action'' is a technical term which means that a person is subject to deportation but that our Federal Government, the administration, decides not to deport them at all, calling it ``deferred action.'' This number is a dramatic increase from previous years. It's much higher than the less than 900 number that was recently quoted by Secretary Napolitano in testimony during a Senate Judiciary hearing. These numbers also seem to drastically contradict statements made by the administration that deferred action would not be used to provide a backdoor amnesty to illegal immigrants. In short, deferred action is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, and that discretion is not to pursue removal from the United States of a particular individual for a specific period of time. It is only intended to be used on very special occasions; but now over 12,000 people a year are given this deferred action. Our broken immigration system in this country continues to allow hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in each year. Increasingly, deferred action is being used as an easy way for the Federal Government to avoid enforcing the law for people who are arrested and caught in the United States illegally.…”