Radio Host Gets Romney To Say He’d Deport Obama’s Uncle

Media still linking Obama to Kenyan relatives he barely knows

Anyone even mildly familiar with Barack Obama’s life story knows that the president did not grow up with his Kenyan father. Instead Obama grew up partly with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia and partly with his grandparents in Hawaii, an experience he documented in the bestselling memoir Dreams From My Father. Yet birthers and the news media seem to conveniently forget this fact, no more so than when Obama’s Kenyan kin winds up in trouble. Take the media coverage of Onyango Obama, the half-brother of the president’s late father, who’s reportedly in the country illegally.

On Wednesday a number of media outlets ran headlines stating that Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney would deport “Obama’s uncle” in Massachusetts for allegedly violating a 20-year-old order to return to Kenya. Romney, for his part, didn’t even recognize the name “Onyango Obama” but was briefed on the 67-year-old Kenyan’s predicament by Boston radio host Howie Carr during an interview. When Carr asked Romney if he’d deport Obama, Romney said that the nation’s immigration laws should be followed.

The motive of the radio host, of course, was to make President Obama look bad. How can the president crack down on illegal immigrant when his own uncle is an undocumented immigrant? But that argument makes no sense considering that Onyongo Obama is far from the president’s uncle in any traditional sense. The president did not grow up with this man nor did he grow up with the aunt who made headlines in 2010 for being an undocumented immigrant. To insinuate that they share the same mindset and code of ethics is irresponsible. Moreover, if the president were so close to his so-called aunt and uncle, the duo likely wouldn’t have found themselves living in the United States without papers.

There’s no excuse for linking these “family members” to the president in a way that suggests he’s soft on illegal immigration, when the Obama administration has ushered in a record number of deportations. More people have been deported under Obama’s tenure than under George W. Bush’s, much to the chagrin of immigrant rights groups. During Obama’s first year in office, the Obama administration increased deportations by 10 percent from 359,795 (during Bush’s last year as president) to 395,165. Obama’s record on immigration, including his support for the Dream Act, speaks for itself—certainly more than any estranged relative living in the U.S. illegally does.