WASHINGTON — First lady Michelle Obama came face-to-face with the sometimes-uncomfortable repercussions of the nation’s immigration-enforcement policies Wednesday when a second-grader voiced her worries that her mother might be deported.
It happened as Obama toured a Washington, D.C.-area elementary school with Margarita Zavala, the first lady of Mexico. At one point, Obama took questions from a dozen second-grade students, who sat in a small circle on the gymnasium floor.
“My mom said . . . Barack Obama is going to take away everybody that doesn’t have papers,” one young girl told the first lady.
“Yeah, well, that’s something that we have to work on, right?” Michelle Obama replied. “To make sure that people can be here with the right kind of papers, right?”
The girl countered, “But my mom doesn’t have any.”
“Well, we have to work on that. We have to fix that, and everybody’s got to work together in Congress to make sure that happens. That’s right,” Obama said before taking the next question.
Immigrant-rights activists seized on the dialogue, which occurred before the president addressed immigration with visiting Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
“This heartbreaking exchange says more about the current state of the immigration debate than the remarks of the two presidents in the Rose Garden,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group, noting that deportations nationally have gone up under the Obama administration.
