White House Apologist Catches Flak Over Immigration

SAN DIEGO -- White House adviser Cecilia Munoz -- who pulls double duty as director of the Domestic Policy Council and the Obama administration's chief Latina spinner of propaganda related to immigration -- was heckled and booed at a recent gathering of immigration lawyers.

Much of the media didn't seem to understand why. The few outlets that covered the incident made it seem as if Munoz was unfairly put on the spot through no fault of her own.

As someone who follows the immigration debate closely, I would have described the reaction as being linked to the fact that this administration has wreaked havoc on America's immigrant communities. It has broken Barack Obama's promise to make immigration reform a top priority, deported more than 2 million people, separated hundreds of thousands of families, spread misinformation about who was being removed, set a yearly quota of 400,000 deportations, used local police to enforce federal immigration law in order to meet that goal, denied that Obama had the executive authority to stop deportations only to reverse course and discover the authority when campaigning for re-election, detained women and children indefinitely without giving them access to counsel, sent Central American refugees home to possible death sentences without due process, and politicized the immigration issue in ways that help Democrats and hurt Republicans so that now no one in Congress will go near it.

Munoz has been a major player in the debacle that has been Obama's immigration policy. It's not merely that she has caught the blame for the mistakes of the administration, but that she's made many of her own -- as when she wildly overestimated the percentage of deportees who had criminal records.

As the daughter of Bolivian immigrants, and someone who first joined the White House as head of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Munoz was almost immediately thrust into defending the administration's zigzagging immigration policy. In fact, in the first term, Munoz was so often called upon to explain enforcement priorities that she could have been mistaken for the official spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

And because Munoz speaks fluent Spanish, she was especially helpful in pulling the wool over the eyes of Latino voters and trying to redirect their anger away from a Democratic president and toward Republicans in Congress. At times, the bilingual messaging was full of contradictions. During an interview on English-language television, she'd take a hard-line view insisting that the law had to be enforced and some separation of families was inevitable. Then, during an interview on Spanish-language television, she'd become warm and cuddly, and come across as eager to accommodate the same illegal immigrants that she had just said on another channel ought to be removed.

Finally, Munoz will not hesitate to be the enforcer. During last year's border crisis involving children from Central America, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- who is now running for the Democratic presidential nomination -- criticized the administration's repatriation efforts when he said: "We are not a country that should turn children away and send them back to certain death." He got an angry call from Munoz and wound up in what CNN termed a "heated discussion."

Given this dreadful record, you might think that Munoz would be an odd choice to speak to the annual meeting of an organization that is supposed to advocate for immigrants -- the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Never heard of it? Not surprised. During much of the last six and a half years, the Democratic-leaning group has taken a powder when it comes to criticizing a president whom many of its members support.

That has begun to change recently, but it's likely that this is only because Obama no longer has to face re-election. With AILA, politics always seems to get in the way of doing the right thing. But that's what happens when you're Democrats first, and advocates second.

For the most part, Munoz's speech to the group went off without a hitch. A few lawyers stood and held up signs or photos of clients, who are being unjustly detained by the administration. But only a few. Most of the crowd appeared to listen politely, and applauded when she was done.

Maybe this wasn't such an odd choice after all. The speaker and the organization seem to be cut from the same cloth. They deserve each other.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.