for people like this who are married to citizens and have citizen children.

What we are doing now is insane and anti family.

If both parents were illegal immigrants, the children would have gone with them, able to return at 18 if they choose to. Breaking up a family like this one makes no sense.

Needs to go viral!

It's very sad.

I've become aware of another situation, though, which to me seems even worse. There are young adults in this country who were adopted internationally whose parents never took the steps toward making them citizens -- and now they're at risk of deportation. They changed the law some time ago so that adoptees from that year forward wouldn't have this problem, but they didn't grandfather-in the children who were already here.

I can't remember the details but I'm assuming these are young adults whose parents are no longer alive to sponsor them. What a disaster.

I knew an English couple who entered the USA illegally through Canada. They had two children born in Canada, and then she got pregnant again and that baby was born in Seattle making her a US citizen. Well, somehow the couple got caught by the migra and there were hearings held to determine whether to deport them. The INS which is what it was called then before it became ICE, determined that the American born child could not be deported and since she needed parents to raise her, they gave legal status and green cards to the rest of the family. Why can't the same ruling be made for this woman because of her American born children? Why is their status different? It seems very racist to me, English (desirable) vs. Hispanic (not so desirable).

After all, wouldn't do at all to have too many of the (as Pappy Bush loved to say) 'little brown ones'.

The case you refer to evidently happened a while ago. I have the vague feeling that, at one point, the government was using a procedure called "relief from deportation" for the noncitizen parent(s) -- no citizenship for them, not even a green card, but they wouldn't be deported. I have the further vague feeling that the policy was tightened up a few years ago.

The English couple might be treated differently today. The Hispanic family in the OP might have been treated differently back then.

Suggesting a racial disparity is a fairly serious charge, so you'd need to be confident that you were comparing apples with apples.

the Europeans were fewer that they changed their policy? I really don't believe the policy change was because there were just more immigrants with American born children across the board. I really think there is a racist element involved.

I'm certainly not saying that immigration policy is set without regard to racial factors. (From 1882 to 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act effectively barred all Chinese from immigration.)

There are other factors, though. People take account of the laws and adjust their behavior accordingly. If having a U.S. citizen child in the family immunizes parents from deportation, then more undocumented immigrants will have children. It may be that a shift to a more humanitarian policy with regard to such families meant that there were more such families, which in turn meant a backlash that went beyond the race or ethnicity of the people involved. Unless you believe in completely open borders, you have to consider whether a particular policy will create an opening for people to game the system. Mitt Romney isn't the first person in history to study the rules and game the system.

Los Angeles, that attracts immigrants from all over the world. It seems our northern border was quite open and our southern border closely monitored. Our ethnic European (white people) illegals moved, lived and worked freely among us, even though their accents marked them as not being Americans. Our southern border immigrants, although they worked among us, lived in their own ghettos and in fear of la migra. Even back before there was the truly whipped up hatred of Latino immigrants that there is today, they were targeted by our INS for deportation much more than the other immigrants.

Since I worked in the restaurant industry a lot, I regularly saw employees disappear to learn later the migra had picked them up and deported them. Not to worry, they usually were back a week later and resumed their jobs. However, between 1960 and 2000, I only saw one Australian illegal deported and that's because he got involved with a married woman. Her husband found out and being that he was quite wealthy, he hired lawyers to deal with the matter, and they pressured the INS into picking him up and deporting him. He too was back in a month.

So yes, I believe we are going to have to figure out some kind of open border policy because our present policies are not keeping immigrants out. They are inhumane in many instances as this story shows and that needs to change. It seems like our depression economy is accomplishing that though these days. There are fewer immigrants and maybe even the tables are turning and our young people might be immigrating to other countries for a better future and some of them might well become illegals in those countries. Karma is a bitch.

Pro-family my ass.

So are the people who think this is OK.

We have got to have immigration reform.