Cecilia Muñoz, longtime vice president of the National Council of La Raza whose appointment on Jan. 20, 2009, to President Obama’s initial cabinet was seen as a payoff to the Hispanic community for the huge role it played in Obama’s winning a front-door key to the White House.
This, many others and I innocently believed, would ensure that el presidente nuevo would move quickly to make good on his oft-repeated promises to end this nation’s undocumented immigrant agony by delivering genuine immigration reform legislation.
Did he do so?
Of course not.
Back then and frequently thereafter, we heard that Obama’s key non-Hispanic inner-circle brain trust, including Rahm Emanuel, who since then was elected mayor of Chicago, insisted that political expediency required the president to reduce his reform priorities to one. Choose it: a decent, legitimate immigration bill or healthcare reform.
For obvious reasons, health care won and the Latino community reverted to its accustomed position at the tag-end of the line.
Could both goals have been achieved? We’ll never know.
As consolation prize, 53 million U.S. Latinos and Latinas have been awarded more presidential lip service and a basically nativist Senate immigration bill.
An increasing number of Latino ex-believers are now figuring out that they’ve been betrayed.
The Obama administration continues by the hour to add to its record of deporting more economic and political refugees —dominantly Hispanic ones – than has any past president in our “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free” history.
The President’s current diabolic catch-and-ship-out strategy tore nearly two million productive immigrant families to shreds in 2012. He would like us to believe that his “racist” Republican adversaries are the real cause of his inhumane inaction.
Now he has lateraled the initiative to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who wants to spend billions more to blockade our border with neighbor Mexico and promulgate his devious, sure-to-fail piece-meal immigration scheme. He has shown zero interest in permitting the 11 million undocumented immigrants we have drawn here over the years ever to become U.S. citizens with a right to vote.
On cue, Cecilia Muñoz, now promoted to Obama’s domestic policy director, gushes the Administration’s joy. She tells the press, “It’s a very big deal.”
Over time, Cecilia has accomplished little more than to appease some fellow Hispanics. She covers Obama’s tracks as his lack of ganas or cojones even drives innocent, born-in-the-USA children “back” to countries where they’ve never been as he imprisons and deports their already exploited parents. He allows our desert floors to be carpeted with refugees’ bones.
Muñoz’s familial roots trail back to La Paz, Bolivia. Does her fealty to her boss and her White House title, with its $172,000 paycheck, trump that?
In politics, sadly, yes; it’s an absolute. On that one, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I pretty much agree.
