In a Washington Post profile that compared gay rights and illegal immigration to the Civil Rights Movement, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson suggested that illegal immigrant children who are flooding across the border should not lose hope.
When the Post “asked about the emotional response of immigration activists, Johnson pointed to an essay his grandfather wrote. “There is a passage in my grandfather’s article that I will someday quote,” Johnson said. “He said our situation should not fall into despair; we should never lose hope and always have faith in the democratic process. I think that resonates in a lot of different contexts.”
On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Johnson, whom President Barack Obama has asked for recommendations for executive actions to ease deportations and change the country’s immigration laws, punted on at least six occasions when asked if most of the illegal immigrant kids who are flooding across the border will be deported. Johnson even said, “We have to do right by the children, but at the end of the day, our border is not open to illegal migration, and we will stem the tide.”
Though Johnson was “careful to frame his approach to immigration less as a civil rights matter and more as a legal question,” the Post emphasized that “Johnson is steeped in the struggle for black civil rights,” then made its own connection between illegal immigration and the Civil Rights Movement.
The Post reported that Johnson’s uncle was a Tuskegee Airman who “was arrested for trying to integrate an officers club,” and “his grandfather’s 1956 essay about the plight of African Americans in the South was praised by Martin Luther King Jr.” Johnson, the Post noted, also “attended Morehouse College with Spike Lee and King’s son, and he plotted student marches at the Atlanta home of King’s widow, Coretta Scott King.” Also, “Johnson’s father, an architect also named Jeh, served on an urban planning commission” for President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
As Breitbart News has reported, there have been at least 50,000 illegal immigrant children who have entered the country since October of last year, and federal officials estimate that at least 150,000 more will try next year. The number of illegal immigrants coming from Central America drastically increased after President Barack Obama gave them hope for amnesty when in 2012, he enacted–by executive fiat–the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The program granted temporary amnesty and work permits to certain illegal immigrant children.
As the Christian Science Monitor noted, “In the fiscal year before Obama unilaterally enacted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, there were 6,560 illegal immigrant kids who crossed the border.” There were 13,625 in the fiscal year immediately after DACA was implemented, and that number has only continued to drastically increase.
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