U.S. Rep Luis Gutierrez will hold an educational forum Sep. 10, at Benito Juarez High School in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, to explain changes in the Obama administration’s updated immigration deportation guidelines.

Under the new guidelines, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will focus their limited resources on undocumented immigrants who are criminals. This should mean that non-criminals – like those who have been living in the U.S. since childhood – would be able to stay in the country, even if they have been apprehended by ICE agents and are scheduled for a deportation hearing.

This policy change looks like a major victory for immigration advocates who have endured the DREAM Act’s failure to clear a U.S. Senate filibuster (the bill would have provided a citizenship pathway to some children of the undocumented), and a lack of movement on comprehensive immigration reform.

“It’s the first good news we’ve gotten since Obama was elected,” said Josh Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition of Immigration and Refugee Rights. “Everything else has been bad news.”

An education forum, though, sounds like a good idea because it’s not clear how the new guidelines will work. “The proof is in the pudding,” said Gutierrez spokesman Douglas Rivlin. “We still need to know how this will be implemented.”

John Morton, the director of ICE, wrote a memo June 17 stressing that ICE has limited resources and that immigration agents need to focus on illegal immigrants that threaten national security, border security and public safety. The agency, then, couldn’t also focus on non-criminal illegal immigrants – including those brought to the U.S. as children, the elderly, pregnant and nursing women, victims of crimes, veterans, and individuals with serious disabilities.

Department of Homeland Security Sec. Janet Napolitano (ICE is part of DHS) explained how Morton’s memo might be enacted in an August 18 letter sent to select U.S. Senators, including Illinois’ Dick Durbin (D-IL).

A Department of Homeland Security/Department of Justice interagency working group will meet to review the 300,000 cases pending before the immigration courts, Napolitano explained. Cases judged “low priority” would be thrown out. This means that the immigrants involved in those cases should be able to stay in the country, and, possibly, apply for work authorization.

Also, the working group would set new ICE guidelines to prevent future low-priority cases from ending up in immigration court. But, at the same time, Napolitano stressed that the Obama administration was not providing “categorical relief” to any group of undocumented immigrants, i.e. all minors or all veterans.

So, in other words, DHS will persist in the large-scale deportation of undocumented immigrants – but the agency does promise to be more discerning in whom it deports.

“DHS thinks it’s going to deport about 400,000 people this year,” Rivlin explains. “The announcement doesn’t change that – but the composition changes.”

“If you are choosing which 400,00 people to deport, then folks who have committed serious crimes should be in the front of the line,” Rivlin adds.

Like Hoyt, Gutierrez is encouraged by the policy change. “This is the Barack Obama we waiting for,” the congressman exuded to an audience at ICIRR’s loop office last week.

But there are a few questions. For one, when is this working group supposed to meet to review the 300,000 cases and who will be included in the group? Also, are the subjects of these low-priority cases allowed to then become U.S. citizens? Or do they have to continue to “live in the shadows” (particularly since DHS refuses to give blanket relief to any particular group)?

“We’re not sure how this is supposed to work,” says Laura Lichter, president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Some of our offices are saying, ‘Yeah this is great and other offices are saying this is nothing new.’”

Part of the skepticism is that the Obama administration has said before that it was targeting criminal illegal immigrants only to maintain the status quo. The Secure Communities program, for example, was supposed to target criminal aliens, but, instead, has mainly contributed to an overall increase in ICE apprehensions.

Gutierrez will meet with ICE officials later this week prior to the education forum. It bears watching if the Chicago congressman continues to believe that the Obama administration is on the right track – or if Gutierrez thinks that ICE has yet to fully formulate its own policy change.

Image: AI.com