At Odds With a Mentor on Deportations

SAN DIEGO -- President Obama's overzealous deportation policies divide Latino Democrats. This division extends to San Antonio, where a rising star in the party is at odds with an older establishment figure who has been called his mentor.

If we're going to watch a Shakespearean drama, first we must set the scene. Activists are holding hunger strikes outside the White House, demanding that Obama slow the record number of deportations -- more than 1,100 per day, totaling 2 million in five years. The president stubbornly refuses to do so.

In 2012, Obama unveiled Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which lets young undocumented immigrants stay in the country and apply for two-year work permits. Recently, however, the president said he would not expand the DACA program to adults, including parents with U.S.-born kids who risk being separated from their children.

"If we start broadening that, then essentially I would be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be very difficult to defend legally," Obama told Telemundo anchor Jose Diaz-Balart. "So that's not an option."

It's astounding. Obama ignores the law when politically expedient and then rediscovers it when convenient. On immigration, he will be whatever you want him to be -- tough, compassionate, or a splash of both.

Now to the drama. Former Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros is one of the most respected figures in the Hispanic community. Yet, there isn't much to respect in his position on deportations.

As part of the immigration task force of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which claims to support immigration reform while at the same time backing the status quo, Cisneros told reporters that he and his colleagues -- former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, etc. -- did not agree with those who demand that Obama stop deportations.

"We believe that's not the right thing to do," he said.

Et tu, Henry? I've known the man for 25 years, and I consider him a friend. Still, I have no doubt that if the president who deported 2 million people, most of them Latino, were a Republican, Cisneros would be raising a ruckus instead of falling in line.

Besides shilling for the establishment, Cisneros gives cover to Obama -- his third choice for president in 2008 behind New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton -- by opposing a stop to deportations.

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