If dealing with the thousands of youths in the U.S. illegally were a midterm exam, there's hardly an answer the Obama administration could give that would be seen universally as the right one.
If Immigration and Customs and Enforcement follows a strategy of "deport them all," the agency runs into situations such as former University of Texas at Arlington student Saad Nabeel's. He came to the United States as a preschooler and graduated from high school in Frisco, but he and his family were deported to Bangladesh. Nabeel and his friends are using Facebook and YouTube to blast the administration and try to facilitate his return here.
If ICE picks "let them stay" and instead spends its finite resources on removing criminals, there's a buzz saw of criticism for not shipping out every person who is in the country illegally. And the complaints churn despite figures showing that more noncitizens are being deported than ever before.
Policing illegal immigration is a complicated, multifaceted operation, and priorities have to be set on how best to use funds and manpower.
Despite public misperception that immigration laws aren't being enforced, removal of illegal aliens has increased each year since 2005, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan project at Syracuse University.
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