President Obama stepped up to the podium this week to address the largest and most powerful annual gathering of Chicano/Latinos and he was smiling. It was at the same NCLR annual conference that in 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama, made one of the most stirring rebukes of this nation's immigration enforcement policies: The system isn't working when 12 million people live in hiding, and hundreds of thousands cross our borders illegally each year; when companies hire undocumented immigrants instead of legal citizens to avoid paying overtime or to avoid a union; when communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids -- when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel. And days before the election that would catapult him to the White House, Mr.