"Our immigration enforcement efforts should be humane and conducted in accordance with due process, and that is why I believe we must stop the raids happening in immigrant communities," Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, said Monday. "We have laws and we must be guided by those laws, but we shouldn't have armed federal officers showing up at peoples' homes, taking women and children out of their beds in the middle of the night," Clinton said in a statement that was unusually critical of the president.
In Congress, where Obama was to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, 135 Democrats co-signed a letter asking that the raids targeting immigrants stop immediately. "We strongly condemn the Department of Homeland Security's recent enforcement operation targeting refugee mothers and children from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala," the letter reads.
Those are the home countries of many undocumented foreigners who have arrived in recent years by crossing the Mexican border. In 2014, the arrival of thousands of unaccompanied minors triggered a political crisis in the United States. Republicans accused the White House of being lax, and ruled out any attempt to legalise the status of the 11 million foreigners living in the United States without proper residency papers.