Advocates and lawmakers who were
in separate meetings Friday said that administration officials are
weighing a range of options including reforms to the deportation system
and ways to grant relief from deportation to targeted populations in the
country, likely by expanding Obama's two-year-old directive that
granted work permits to certain immigrants brought here illegally as
youths. That program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or
DACA, has been extended to more than 500,000 immigrants so far.
Advocates would like to
see deferred action made available to anyone who would have been
eligible for eventual citizenship under a comprehensive immigration bill
the Senate passed last year, which would be around 9 million people.
But Obama told them in a meeting a month ago to "right-size"
expectations, even as he pledged to be aggressive in steps he does take.
That's
led advocates to focus on other populations Obama might address,
including parents or legal guardians of U.S. citizen children (around
3.8 million people as of 2009, according to an analysis by Pew
Research's Hispanic Trends Project) and parents or legal guardians of
DACA recipients (perhaps 500,000 to 1 million people, according to the
Fair Immigration Reform Movement).
"Our
parents deserve to live without the fear of deportation," Maria Praeli,
a 21-year-old from New Haven who came to the United States from Peru 16
years ago, said at a protest outside the White House on Monday. "It is
time for the president to go big and to go bold."
Another
focus could be the potentially hundreds of thousands of people who
might be eligible for green cards today if current law didn't require
them to leave the country for 10 years before applying for one.news.yahoo
