A Tale of Two Janets

These days Janet Napolitano has been singing a different tune on immigration than she did as a border state governor, and it's a bit off key.

This week, at the 2009 Border Security Conference in El Paso, Texas, Secretary Janet Napolitano was reported as saying:

…we’re taking a common-sense, comprehensive look at both new and old programs to ensure that we have the most effective approach possible. Now in some instances, that means that we are continuing things that were initiated in the past. Why? … Well, because when you look at some of these things and you look at them carefully, and you look at them in the context of what we are trying to accomplish, in other words, linking things together, we find that they are consistent with our values and they make sense from a law enforcement perspective.

Late last month, a number of groups took to the streets, protesting DHS and Napolitano for not doing enough to end ineffective Bush-era tactics. These protests came on the heels of a few reports that revealed one thing: misguided DHS enforcement tactics are not working, not even from a "law enforcement perspective.”

The Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Yeshiva University reported on ICE raid violations; the Police Foundation reported on the ineffectiveness of 287(g); and the National Immigration Law Center released a scathing report on DHS’ mismanagement of immigration jails.

This amounts to a whole new songbook. Janet Napolitano once gained massive criticism from the far right for stating that illegal immigration was not a crime, and more importantly, while governor of Arizona, she wrote a piece in the Washington Post calling on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform:

No one favors illegal immigration. But there are upwards of 12 million people illegally in this country -- people who work, who have settled their families and who have raised their children here. For 20 years our country has done basically nothing to enforce the 1986 legislation against either the employers who hired illegal immigrants or those who crossed our borders illegally to work for them. Accordingly, our current system is, effectively, silent amnesty.

If we have no comprehensive immigration reform this year, and if we do not deal rigorously and openly with those already here, silent amnesty will continue. As a border-state governor who has dealt with immigration issues more than any other governor I know of, I am certain that continued inaction by Congress -- silent amnesty -- is the worst of all worlds.

While Napolitano is occupied with enforcement, she has avoided talking about the issue she was once so passionate about and is missing the point that she so clearly understood when she was a border state governor; essentially, that we need Comprehensive Immigration Reform if we want to restore the rule of law and have enforcement that works. A continuation of the same extreme, broken strategies tested and tried by past administrations will always end with the same, poor results – it will never be enough.

As all signs point away from common sense and toward nonsensical, it’s a little unclear what DHS and Napolitano are hoping to achieve.