In case you weren’t keeping up with U.S. immigration news this week, here were the big topics:
On Monday Jeh Johnson (left) was confirmed as the new secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Friday, USCIS director Alejandro Mayorkas was appointed deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.
Wednesday, Florida’s Miami-Dade county announced it would no longer house detained undocumented immigrants on behalf of the federal government, citing financial and humanitarian issues.
Thursday ICE released its year-end report on deportations, which showed the annual number immigrants removed from the U.S. in 2013 (368,644 to be exact) dropped for the first time since Obama took office. Almost 2 million immigrants have been deported during his administration.
That same day, PewResearch released their survey results showing that Hispanic Americans overwhelmingly favor relief from deportations for undocumented immigrants over a path to citizenship.
New DHS secretary Johnson has already gone on record in one of his first statements on immigration to say he thinks keeping deportation quotas for ICE isn’t “a good idea.”
Thursday evening New Jersey became the newest state to officially grant in-state tuition to its undocumented students.
Today Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a close ally of House Speaker John Boehner, announced that immigration reform has a real possibility of passing in 2014. This continues to build credibility to the case that Boehner is slowly heading towards pushing an immigration reform plan through the House in 2014.
