The United States and Israel were born to ingather — the U.S. as the proverbial nation of immigrants, though not all its early settlers came here voluntarily; the modern state of Israel, as the haven and magnet for dispersed Jews everywhere. That is the ideal, anyhow. The reality of who is allowed to enter and who is allowed to stay is much more complicated. As is the salient question now of who is deported.
After years of stalled negotiations in Congress over immigration reform, the Obama administration has finally decided to act on its own to humanize American procedures. Under a new policy, a working group from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments is reviewing about 300,000 cases currently before immigration courts with the aim of stopping deportations of illegal immigrants whose only crime is to be in America. In particular, officials are examining records of those who came here illegally when they were children, an effort to do what stalled legislation in Congress should have done, which is to grant legal status to youngsters brought here by their parents through no fault of their own.
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