Via Washington Times:

Immigrant advocates on Monday asked international human rights monitors to step in and oversee the Obama administration’s deportation policies, saying the U.S. is violating international standards both in how it detains people and who it chooses to deport.

Testifying to the Organization of American States’ human rights commission, advocates said the U.S. government doesn’t take into account family hardships when it decides to apprehend and deport illegal immigrants, and it said the administration treats illegal immigrants like criminals when it detains them.

“They’re chasing us down as if we were animals,” Saul Merlos, a father from New Orleans who is slated to be deported in December after 18 years in the U.S., told commissioners.

Asking the international commission to monitor U.S. deportation efforts is the latest move by advocates eager to shame President Obama, who they argue has set new records by deporting about 400,000 immigrants every year. Nearing the end of his fifth year in office, that means Mr. Obama will soon have overseen 2 million deportations.

The groups, which includes the AFL-CIO, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the Stanford Law School Immigrant Rights Clinic, said maintaining deportation quotas pushes the administration to detain and deport more people than it should.

The Obama administration says it is trying to enforce the laws on the books, though it has exercised what it calls prosecutorial discretion in carving out large swaths of illegal immigrants it says it will not try to deport, among them illegal immigrants brought here as minors who are pursuing an education.