Barack Obama spent an outsized portion of his presidency lecturing Americans about illegal immigration.

He unilaterally suspended prosecutions of a wide swath of illegal immigrants through his executive amnesty,

meanwhile railing all about the evils of the Republicans.

He ripped Donald Trump's supposed xenophobia over Trump's strict anti-legal immigration proposals.

But Obama and Democrats don't actually

care about illegal immigrants. In fact, they would actually prefer that illegal immigrants

retain that status so they can be used as a political sword against Republicans. The fact

is on full display this morning after a senior policy advisor to Obama said Obama would not

confer a blanket pardon on illegal immigrants. Cecilia Munoz, who's a domestic policy advisor, she said, quote, I know that people are

hoping for use of a pardon authority as a way to protect people. It's ultimately not for a couple

of reasons. One is that general pardon authority is generally designed for criminal violations,

not civil, but it also doesn't confer legal status. Only Congress can do that,

and so ultimately it wouldn't protect a single soul from deportation, so it's not an answer here for

this population. That, by the way, was also true of Obama's deferred action for childhood

rivals and deferred action for parents of Americans program. That's DACA and DAPA. They didn't grant

citizenship or prevent future deportations. They merely stopped deportations

here and now. Pardoning illegal immigrants would remove the legal pretext for deportation.

Other crimes, such as fraud, if you're using a social security number that's false, that would

still be prosecutable, but it might not be punishable with deportation. In fact, Obama could

pardon those crimes as well, removing all legal grounds for prosecution.

Now, this isn't making the case Obama should pardon illegal immigrants, of course.

It would be the essence of lawlessness, a gross abuse of the executive power.

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