WASHINGTON - First lady Michelle Obama came face-to-face with the sometimes uncomfortable repercussions of her husband's immigration-enforcement policies Wednesday when a second-grader voiced her worries that her mother might be deported.
It happened as Mrs. Obama toured a Washington, D.C.-area elementary school with Margarita Zavala, the first lady of Mexico, two hours before President Obama renewed his call for comprehensive immigration reform. At one point, Mrs. Obama took questions from a dozen second-grade students, who sat in a small circle on the gymnasium floor.
"My mom said … Barack Obama is going to take away everybody that doesn't have papers," one young girl told the first lady.
"Yeah, well, that's something that we have to work on, right?" Mrs. Obama replied. "To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right? That's exactly right."
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The girl countered, "But my mom doesn't have any."
"Well we have to work on that, we have to fix that and everybody's got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens. That's right," Mrs. Obama said before moving on to the next question.
Immigrant-rights activists seized on the dialogue, which occurred before President Obama addressed immigration with Mexican President Felipe Calderón in the White House Rose Garden.
"This heartbreaking exchange says more about the current state of the immigration debate than the remarks of the two presidents in the Rose Garden," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration group, noting that deportations nationally have gone up under Obama.
The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency says its priority is to remove illegal immigrants who are violent criminals. But it maintains a goal of 400,000 deportations this year, which would be a record. John Morton, the former federal prosecutor who heads ICE, has said his agency often exercises discretion in deciding whether to deport illegal immigrants. But officials make no apologies for enforcing a law that calls for the removal of any illegal immigrant - not just criminals.
