Fox News correspondent William La Jeunesse continued his trend of misleading reporting on immigration today with a segment on the Obama administration's policies regarding workplace enforcement of illegal immigration laws. La Jeunesse's report centered on the decrease in “illegal worker arrests” during job site raids under the Obama administration. He began by stating that “this president is taking a very different approach to worksite enforcement” than President Bush did and claimed that “under this president, most of the illegal workers go free.”
La Jeunesse also included commentary from Bush administration ICE director Julie Myers, who suggested that law enforcement officials were now “turning a blind eye” to illegal workers and claimed the policy amounts to “de facto amnesty.”
First of all, La Jeunesse's report lacked necessary context, singling out the number of arrests and deportations due to worksite enforcement while ignoring the total numbers to suggest that the Obama administration has been lax in enforcing immigration law. In fact, despite a decrease in the number of workplace raids and arrests, the Obama administration has deported a record number of undocumented immigrants. Obama's first year in office saw a total of 387,790 deportations, up 5 percent from 2008 under the Bush administration.
La Jeunesse also neglected to mention that during her tenure as Department of Homeland Security assistant secretary for ICE, Myers came under harsh criticism, not just for awarding an employee dressed up as an escaped Jamaican prisoner (complete with blackface) with a prize for “most original costume” at an ICE Halloween party (and then trying to cover it up), but for the “heavy-handed” worksite raids she emphasized throughout her tenure. In fact, in 2008, 114 employees of Micro Solutions Enterprises (MSE), all legal residents or citizens, filed claims against ICE after they were detained during a raid on their employer.