While President Barack Obama spoke about the economy Thursday at Northwestern University, about two-dozen immigration reform advocates protested outside, calling the president the “deporter in-chief.”
Gutierrez accused Obama and his administration of “playing it safe.”
“Playing it safe means that ‘We’re going to abandon our values and abandon a community that we said we were going to support and defend,'” he said during a press conference Monday morning at Casa Michoacan in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood.
“Playing it safe, maybe it wins elections, maybe it loses elections, but playing it safe rarely leads to fairness, rarely leads to justice and almost never leads to good public policy which you can be proud of,” Gutierrez said.
A gridlocked Congress failed to do the big things: overhauling the nation's immigration system, reforming the loophole-cluttered tax code and stiffening background checks on gun buyers. Now it's time to see whether it can just do the basics.
Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday the Republican-controlled House will file an election-year lawsuit accusing President Barack Obama of failing to carry out the laws passed by Congress.
Immigration reform is not dead, according to a group of elected officials who on Tuesday met in Chicago to discuss the benefits of providing a streamlined path to citizenship for America’s more than 11 million undocumented immigrants.
“So many people in America feel that comprehensive immigration reform is dead, that somehow it doesn’t have any possibility of being enacted into law. And I think, if anything, our presence here on this panel this morning, says that it’s alive and well,” said U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D, IL-4). “The conversation is continuing.”
The notion that unemployment benefits are a disincentive to look for work is both false and misguided, U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL,10) said at a discussion Friday in Lake County about the need to extend emergency unemployment insurance.
While U.S. Rep. Peter Roskam (R, IL-6)
attended a town hall meeting in Naperville on Wednesday, a group of
protesters, upset with the congressman’s opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and several immigration
reform proposals, held a demonstration outside.
Roskam,
the protesters allege, has not offered any concrete solutions to fix
the nation’s broken immigration and health care systems, but instead has
only blocked solutions based on partisanship.
“Democracy can’t survive on just standing in the way,” said John Gaudette, organizing director for Citizen Action Illinois,
who helped organize the protest. “If he’s taking the opposing stance,
he needs to tell us what works and come up with an alternative plan.”