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From Colorlines:

Authorities from DHS and the Department of Justice will review on a case by case basis the 300,000 people facing deportation and whose cases are currently clogging up the immigration courts. Immigrants facing deportation who are not a high priority for deportation, such as those with no criminal record or those who immigrated to the U.S. as young children, will be removed from the queue.

The Obama administration has long maintained that it wants to focus its immigration enforcement efforts on undocumented immigrants who have serious criminal convictions on their records and who are a national security. Those enforcement priorities were laid out in a memo issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton last year…

However, the uptick in the Obama administration’s record-setting deportation rate has been driven in large part by the deportation of folks with no criminal record at all. And the majority of deportees who did have criminal records were people classified as Level 3 offenders. The administration deported nearly 400,000 people in fiscal year 2010, and has deported one million people since President Obama came to office in 2009.

Meanwhile, the GOP is calling Obama’s deportation policy a “backdoor amnesty” plan.

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