In 2008, I was one of the many who hit the streets, knocked at doors and stood under the hot Florida sun to help President Obama get elected. After two and a half years, what did I get from my hard work? 1 million deportations and a total devastation of my community! President Obama is the president that has deported more people in our nation’s history –with the grand majority posing no threat to society at all.

A few people asked me why the Obama Administration is so dead-set on deporting hundreds of thousands of immigrants, when they have no hope of attracting the anti-immigrant crowd from a political standpoint. Rep. Luis Gutierrez explained that to me at Netroots Nation, and I think if more people understood this rationale you’d see even more outcry than you do now:

So why have there been so many deportations, more than under the Bush Administration? Gutierrez suggested that the White House feels they have a mandate from Congress to deport 400,000 people a year. Which means they’re literally breaking up families to fulfill a budgetary authority. Congress has expanded deportation systems and given DHS more money to deport. So the contractors have been paid, and now they have to be used. That’s how Secure Communities, a real cash cow for the contractors, was created. And that’s why they don’t want states dropping out. “The fastest-growing airline in the country is the one that flies around undocumented immigrants,” said Gutierrez. In the end, it comes down to money, for detention, information sharing and the mechanics of deportation.

Hundreds of immigrants rights advocates in Los Angeles staged a walkout during a federal task force field hearing about the Secure Communities program, blamed for the deportations of tens of thousands of non-citizens living peacefully in America. Activists implored the members of the task force to resign their post, and recommend that the Obama Administration end Secure Communities, before exiting the meeting to a chant of “we don’t need a hearing, we need to end the program.”

The Obama Administration has denied the request of a married couple in San Francisco, ordering the expulsion of one spouse who is the primary caregiver of his legally married husband with AIDS.

Team Obama is incapable of valuing our actual relationships, while making pretty speeches about DOMA’s unconstitutionality.

HALT

Republican Lamar Smith of Texas, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, profoundly wasted the committee’s time today with a junk piece of legislation that would only make matters worse for immigration authorities if passed. The legislation, the “Hinder the Administration’s Legalization Temptation (HALT) Act,” limit the administrative authority the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration Customs & Enforcment (ICE) has to consider waivers and issue cancel deportations, if deemed necessary.

It is not only detainees at Guantanamo or Bagram Airbase that are being mistreated. Right here in the United States, undocumented immigrants are being mistreated by for profit prison companies.

Management and Training Corporation (MTC) runs an ICE detention center in town, which recently had to lay off 120 employees because it could not secure the contracts it had intended on getting, meaning they would have less prisoners than anticipated. But what’s even worse is that MTC for years had not been paying these employees their required wages. They were being paid $8-9 an hour (basically minimum wage, to supervise criminals) for nearly 5 years, during which time they were supposed to have been paid at least $14.50 per hour.