Illegal Immigration | featured news

As President Obama heads to Florida to talk to Hispanic lawmakers, his re-election campaign is hitting Republican opponent Mitt Romney over the immigration issue. A new video from the campaign spotlights Romney's refusal to say whether he would repeal Obama's new policy ending deportations of children of illegal immigrants.

In the past six days, President Obama has sent a very clear message to Republicans in Congress. And that message goes like this: Bring it on. His decision to stop actively deporting young illegal immigrants, which was announced last Friday, and his action Wednesday to invoke executive privilege over documents tied to the “Fast and Furious” program both amount to a finger in the eye of House GOPers.

Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.) has introduced the “Prohibiting Back-door Amnesty Act of 2012” legislation that would block the president’s action — and exposes the ongoing divide in the GOP on immigration issues in an election year.

President Obama’s decision to extend administrative relief to an estimated 800,000 young illegal immigrants has won favor with Latino voters in key battleground states, according to a new poll.

President Obama's order Friday suspending deportations for some young illegal immigrants sent a charge through social media over the weekend, with both the president and his Republican challenger seeing steep spikes in online chatter about them. According to the social media analysis firm VoterTide, about 52,000 messages about Obama were posted to Twitter Friday, a 74% jump over his daily average of about 30,000 and the highest number of mentions since he announced his support for gay marriage May 9. The firm did not offer an estimate of how many of these tweets were positive or negative.

Mitt Romney is refusing to say that he would overturn President Barack Obama's new policy allowing some young illegal immigrants to stay in the United States... before the Iowa caucuses in January, when he faced the challenge of winning over the right-wing base of the GOP, he pledged to veto legislation backed by Democrats that would have created a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

For Angelica Salas, it was a long time coming. The Obama administration's announcement that it would stop deporting illegal immigrants who were brought here as children was the culmination of more than a decade of persistent political organizing by Salas and her fellow immigrant rights advocates.

It boosts his reelection campaign among Latinos and young people and amounts to an end run around Republican rivals. By calling a halt to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants, President Obama not only helps himself politically with two groups vital to his reelection — Latinos and young people — but also shows the advantage that comes with a seat in the Oval Office.

In oral arguments, both liberal and conservative justices indicate they may maintain a provision of the Arizona law that tells police to check the immigration status of people they stop.

Newt Gingrich has charged into the fray over illegal immigration, risking conservative ire just as his Republican presidential campaign - once declared all but dead - has vaulted into front-runner status....