The simple answer is yes, the real answer a bit more complicated.
The administration of The Amazing Mr. O was a mess of contradictions on immigration.
On the one hand, it supported things like DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and the DREAM Act, which would have provided people who came here as children with a path to citizenship.
On the other hand, it did deport more people than any previous administration and yes the total came to about 3 million over the eight years, leading immigration-rights communities to call him “the Deporter-in-Chief.”
On the other other hand, over time, particularly after a policy change in 2014, the deportations came to focus more and more on people who had actually been convicted of serious crimes, as result of which the rate of deportations pretty steadily dropped over the period 2009-2016. And a not-insignificant percentage of the deportations were I forget the technical term but were people who were caught crossing the border and were sent back immediately, so that in the technical legal sense they never entered the US but were counted as deportations - as even the administration of The Orange Overlord not only admitted but criticized as suggesting Obama was overstating his administration’s attempts to “secure the border.”
Oh, wait, I need a fourth hand. A lot of the people now targeted by the reactionaries populating what should be called the wrong wing are those who had entered legally and simply overstayed their visa. They were supposed to obtain a green card within a year. The Orange Overlord canceled a policy that said that simply not having done that by then was not by itself sufficient grounds for detention or deportation. That policy was adopted in 2010 - that is, during Obama’s first term (and therefore existed throughout TOO’s first term).
As for outrage, it was indeed muted (I have groused often enough about how the left goes silent when a D is in the White House) but not absent; thus the “Deporter-in-Chief” label and the shift in later years in the direction of the actually convicted. So yeah, definitely bad - but today is way worse.
The outrage now is driven by four differences: The open violence and racism of the approach, intentionally designed to spread terror among immigrant communities; the indiscriminate sweeping up of citizens and legal residents1; the refusal to acknowledge and deliberate efforts to avoid providing an opportunity for habeas relief; and the openly-declared intent to deport not the roughly 400,000 per year of the Obama term, but a million per year while all but openly declaring they want the US to be a white ethno-state. (”America is for Americans and Americans only.” - Stephen Miller, October 2024)
Oh, and don’t forget the attacks on birthright citizenship and the recrudescence of family separation. (I recently learned the word “recrudescence,” meaning “the return of something bad after a period of relief,” and I love it.)
Bottom line for me: Yes, Obama deported three million people and yes that was more than any previous administration and yes he didn’t get near enough pushback. I was among the guilty on that, as immigration was a topic I only occasionally addressed prior to about 2016. I did do a three-parter on the overall topic in 2019 which I reposted in 2024; if you want, you can see them here:
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-three-fer-on-immiagration-part-one.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-three-fer-on-immigration-part-two.html
https://whoviating.blogspot.com/2024/04/a-three-fer-on-immigration-part-three.html
As for the bombing, yeah, he absolutely did bomb seven countries (some claim eight, but that involves stretching definitions): Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen. And yes, it absolutely was without specific Congressional authorization.
Obama claimed the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) from either 2001 or, in the case of Iraq, 2002 gave him the authority, an assertion at best called a cheap and convenient excuse (more accurately, complete bullshit) to avoid any necessity to justify any of it and knowing he could get away with exercising extraordinary and extra-legal power because Congress was too feckless or in the case of Democrats too anxious about the horrifying prospect of challenging their popular president to do anything about it.2 All he had to do was to wave around the label “terrorist” and anything goes3 - including goes “boom.”
It wasn’t only bombing, by the way. Over his time in office, he also blew through his own declared limits on US forces in Iraq, the time frame for withdrawal from Afghanistan, and no “boots on the ground” in Syria.
And
again, the outrage was muted - but I had enough of my own. You might
like to watch this starting at about 11:15 to see my 10 reasons I wasn’t
going to vote for Obama in 2012:
I just realized that this was very likely TMI but screw it, I’m not going to edit it. Just correcting typos takes more energy than I case to devote.
--
2It is worth recalling that in 2007, Obama said that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
3Including extrajudicial murder.
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