Last year there were a record number of 347,000 deportations as President Bush tried to re-unite his party with a get tough enforcement-first immigration policy. Well we know that this resulted in 347,000 families broken up, but what else have we learned?

The New York Times has done a stunning expose of the actual impact of this strategy. Federal courts are jammed with small time immigration cases, and meanwhile prosecutions of weapons violations, drug dealing, and white-collar crime (where were you Feds when the corporate fat cats were robbing their own banks?) plummeted.

Yesterday we learned that ICE agents had quotas for immigrant arrests, so rather than hunting down criminals they increased the percentage of non-criminals and family members because it was easier.

President Obama said in his inaugural "It is time to set aside childish things." We agree. It is time to stop immigration grandstanding that destroys families and get serious about real solutions. Let's use our precious law enforcement resources on bad people instead of harmless workers and families.