The worst part was that the government could punish offenders retroactively, so if someone had committed an aggravated felony five or ten years before the law was passed he would still be deported. In a memo, from November 1996, Rahm Emanuel recommended that the president make use of the new law to burnish his image as being tough on crime. If Clinton took advantage of the opportunities afforded by IIRIRA, Emanuel wrote, he could “claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens.”
