ABSTRACT
During the campaign, there were few hints that the Obama administration’s first important announcement on immigration would be Barack Obama extending some of President Bush’s most excessive immigration control policies at the border. And yet, on March 24, 2009, that’s exactly what the Obama White House did. The White House announced that it would, in effect, double down on immigration control: doubling the size of border enforcement task forces and violent criminal alien teams; tripling the number of intelligence analysts along the border; and quadrupling the number of border liaisons working with Mexican law enforcement officials (Thompson, March 24, 2009). This includes security teams that combine local, state and federal officers, 16 new DEA positions at the border, 100 officials from the ATF, and possibly the National Guard.
