Bracing for automatic budget cuts set to go into effect tomorrow, the Department of Homeland Security released about 10,000 nonviolent detainees from immigration detention centers on Monday. Republican lawmakers have railed against the move, even as two attempts to avert the so-called sequester cuts were derailed in the Senate today. Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) went so far as to compare the DHS’ release of detainees to communist Cuba:

This reminds me of Fidel Castro’s release of criminals in the Mariel Boatlift in 1980…This is unacceptable, irresponsible and reckless. If this is the best cost-savings that Secretary Napolitano can do, then we have to begin to seriously question her judgment…How many criminals have now been released on our streets? And the president shrugs his shoulders and pretends that someone else is responsible. At a certain point, President Obama must take ownership of what goes on in his own administration.

The Mariel Boatlift was a mass exodus from Cuba to the US that erupted into controversy when it was discovered some of the refugees were from Cuban jails and mental hospitals. But according to a Congressional report, just 10 percent of the 125,366 Cubans who came to the US had a criminal record or a history of mental illness that would have prevented them from immigrating to the US. These so-called “excludables” returned to Cuba 4 years later. Even so, “Marielitos” endured a stigma from political and media portrayals of the refugees as criminals.

Like Marielitos, the detainees being released by the DHS have been stigmatized as dangerous criminals by anti-immigrant lawmakers like Barletta. All 10,000 detainees were convicted of nonviolent immigration-related crimes. In fact, the largest growing segment of the US prison population are detained for nonviolent immigration offenses. ICE detainees are often never even convicted of an immigration crime, but are simply sent to languish indefinitely in detention centers, while awaiting a trial. Thousands of detainees in 2010 actually turned out to be American citizens.

On March 25, North Carolina will begin issuing driver’s licenses to thousands of undocumented immigrants who qualify for the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — but there is a catch. A markup of North Carolina’s new driver’s license for immigrants, pictured above, distinguishes the license by a bright pink stripe and the bolded words “NO LAWFUL STATUS.” Legal non-citizens will also have a special license, though Fox 8 reports it is unclear what they will look like.

According to the Charlotte Observer, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) signed off on the design because it would distinguish “between legal presence versus legal status.” Meanwhile, Republican legislators have introduced a bill to delay the licenses from being issued. Bill sponsors cite “voter fraud” as one reason to block driver’s licenses. But a recent state review found voter fraud is almost nonexistent in the state.

Driver’s licenses not only provide undocumented immigrants with needed identification, but research also shows it would make roads safer. However, these driver’s licenses mark undocumented immigrants as second-class residents: “North Carolina should not be making it harder for aspiring citizens to integrate and contribute to our communities by branding them with a second-class driver’s license,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Raul Pinto told the Associated Press. “There is simply no reason for officials to stigmatize people who are in the U.S. legally with an unnecessary marker that could lead to harassment, confusion, and racial profiling.”

North Carolina is one of as many as 30 states that will issue driver’s licenses to DACA beneficiaries.

Most Americans back a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, which is a key component in both the Senate bipartisan framework and the president’s plan.

But an earned path to citizenship has drawn support from unexpected sources, too. A number of Tea Party lawmakers, evangelicals, and conservative leaders are part of the growing momentum calling for comprehensive immigration reform to include citizenship:

1. Rand Paul
In his response to the State of the Union, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) said the Tea Party, “must be the party that says, ‘If you want to work, if you want to become an American, we welcome you.”‘ Paul first embraced an “eventual path” to citizenship for undocumented immigrants after the 2012 election, though his past positions include wanting to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants. Marco Rubio, another Tea Party favorite, also endorses citizenship.

2. Grover Norquist
Grover Norquist has led the right’s anti-tax fights on the fiscal cliff and sequester, but he is a supporter of comprehensive immigration reform. “Texas is a voice on making sure the center-right movement — conservatives, Republicans, Americans — are seen properly on this issue,” Norquist said earlier in February. “We’re getting past this sense that conservatives are supposed to be anti-immigrant.”

3. Fox News Chief Roger Ailes
In an interview with The New Republic Fox News chief Roger Ailes said, “I think the word ‘illegal immigration’ is a false name. We should all defend sovereignty, then take a Judeo-Christian approach to immigration. I don’t have any problem with a path to citizenship.” Though Ailes’ motives are unclear — he said in the same interview Latinos are a “tremendous business opportunity” for the network — Fox News personalities have considerably softened their commentary on immigration reform, notably Sean Hannity. “You create a pathway for those people that are here — you don’t say you’ve got to go home,” Hannity said in November. “And that is a position that I’ve evolved on.”

4. Conservative evangelicals
Focus on the Family joined joined other conservative evangelicals, traditionally the least supportive of comprehensive reform, to campaign for “compassionate and just treatment of immigrants.” In November, the Evangelical Immigration Table sent an open letter to Congress requesting citizenship or legalization for undocumented immigrants. According to a 2010 Public Religion Research Institute poll, evangelicals support reform with citizenship by a margin of 2-1. Six years ago, Pew found a majority of white evangelicals viewed immigration as a threat. Now, evangelical leaders cite a new understanding of the Bible as the reason for the shift.

5. Border State Republicans
Republicans from the state with the nation’s fifth-highest Latino population became the first state GOP party to endorse comprehensive immigration with a clear path to citizenship. Party officials said the GOP’s hard line on immigration reform conflicts with the “party’s historic commitment to civil rights.” Though many Texas Republicans have yet to officially come forward, there is a Democratic-sponsored resolution in the House urging Congress to “swiftly enact and fund comprehensive immigration reform that creates a road map to citizenship.”

A top conservative in the House of Representatives told NPR Thursday morning that he opposes bipartisan proposals to allow undocumented immigrants to earn a path to citizenship, but would support expanding “a guest-worker program for immigrant-labor-dependent U.S. agriculture” to ensure that farms have a steady stream of foreign labor to fulfill the “dirtiest jobs.”

The Senate’s bipartisan framework for immigration reform includes a separate track for agricultural workers, allowing them to “earn a path to citizenship through a different process under our new agricultural worker program” and lawmakers had previously considered proposals “that would provide agricultural employers with a stable, legal labor force while protecting farmworkers from exploitative working conditions.”

In light of current proposals for earned citizenship, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) is concerned that legalized agricultural workers will take opportunity of their legal status to abandon back-breaking agricultural work and find jobs elsewhere, leaving farmers without a stable stream of labor.

“You’re going to have to have a program that assures those farms and those processing plants that there will be workers,” he says. “Because if you give them legal status, they can work anywhere in the United States — they’re not going to necessarily work at the hardest, toughest, dirtiest jobs.”

Immigration reform, then, could include a compromise that requires agricultural workers to remain in the industry for a pre-determined period of time and a new temporary worker program that ensures a constant supply of farm workers.

Opponents of comprehensive immigration reform in the House of Representatives and at Heritage have stuck to the myth that a path to citizenship would “cost trillions.” Citing a debunked 2007 Heritage study about immigration reform’s impact on Medicare and Social Security, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA) argued on ABC’s This Week, “One thing that we’re missing in this whole debate about illegal immigration is the cost.”

Mainstream economic consensus, however, says otherwise. Immigrants contribute far more into the economy than what they receive, paying taxes and creating jobs.

And a new paper from the libertarian Cato Institute agrees, undermining the stereotype that immigrants burden the economy. According to Cato, immigrants are less likely to use a range of social safety net programs than U.S. citizens:

The most recent Census data confirm that low-income non-citizen adults and children generally have lower rates of use of public benefits than native-born adults or citizen children whose parents are also citizens. Non-citizen immigrants’ (both adults and children) utilization of Medicaid, SNAP, and SSI are lower. Adult receipt of cash assistance is uncommon (2% to 3%), regardless of citizenship status. Non-citizen children are less likely to use cash assistance than citizen children with citizen parents.

Moreover, when low-income non-citizens receive public benefits, the average value of benefits per recipient is almost always lower than for those who are native-born. This held true for both adults and children in Medicaid and SNAP, and for non-citizen children in households receiving cash assistance and SSI benefits. The average per recipient benefit levels were similar for adults receiving cash assistance or SSI.

Cato’s results are in line with findings from the Center for American Progress that show immigrants pay substantially more than what they receive in benefits. The chart below shows that immigrants receive 16 percent less in Social Security benefits than the native born:

Immigrants — legal and undocumented — are barred from many government programs, and would not be eligible for health care coverage under President Obama’s reform proposal. Right now, DREAMers granted deferred action remain ineligible for Obamacare, and even in-state tuition in many states.

That has not stopped the Heritage Foundation from arguing a path to citizenship will be too costly, or the New York Times from taking a similarly flawed snapshot that fails to include the billions of dollars in taxes immigrants pay into the system.

Comprehensive reform with a path to citizenship would expand virtually every sector of the economy, injecting $1.5 trillion to the GDP and up to $5.4 billion more in tax revenue.

In January, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined a group of eight senators working to pass comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants. Appearing on a series of conservative talk radio stations to promote the plan, the first-term senator characterized the effort as “the first step” in the long road toward fixing the nation’s broken immigration system and said he expected to incorporate changes from both President Obama and the American public before any bill could become law.

“All we can come up with is a starting point…there are, you know, 94 other senators who have opinions about what this law should look like and there is the American public and there is the House and the Executive Branch so obviously people are going to have some input as to what they want it to look like …this is the first step, this is the architecture,” Rubio told Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey in January.

But on Sunday, Rubio signaled that he has little actual interest in collaborating with the White House on reform. After USA Today published a leaked and incomplete draft of President Obama’s immigration reform bill — which resembles 2007′s bipartisan legislation and Rubio’s own principles — the first-term senator rushed a statement condemning the administration for contributing to the very debate he claimed would be incomplete without its input. Rather than offering a constructive critique of the leaked portions or highlighting areas of similarity, Rubio announced that Obama’s bill is “disappointing to those of us working on a serious solution” and is “dead on arrival in Congress.”

The statement, designed to convince conservatives that the immigration reform principles Rubio supports differ drastically from Obama’s, is particularly jarring in light of the senator’s past insistance that the president should lead on immigration.

Earlier this year, Rubio told the Wall Street Journal that Obama has “not done a thing” on reform and is likely using the issue to mobilize the Democratic base. During the presidential campaign, Rubio criticized Obama for failing to achieve reform in his first term. “His party controlled Congress for two years,” he told Fox News in October, “and they did absolutely nothing.”

But now that Obama is engaged with the issue, Rubio is still outraged: He’s claiming that the president is undermining the Congressional legislative process by developing an alternative plan should bipartisan talks break down while complaining that Obama isn’t involved enough in one-on-one conversations with lawmakers.

On Sunday, Republicans lashed out at a leaked draft of the White House’s plan to reform the immigration system.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said any proposal from the president that lacked Republican input would be “dead on arrival” and is “hurting the effort” at reform. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) claimed that Obama was looking for a “partisan advantage” on the issue and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) announced that the draft demonstrated that “the president doesn’t want immigration reform.”

But as White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough made clear during appearances on several Sunday talk shows, Obama is committed to immigration reform but is developing a back-up plan, to be used only in the event that talks “break down.” Short of negotiation failure, the White House stands firmly behind bipartisan congressional negotiations:

BOB SCHIEFFER: So is this a new plan the president is circulating?

MCDONOUGH: I think the report said … it has been circulating inside the administration. And I think the president laid out in Las Vegas last week we will be prepared with our own plans if the talks between Republicans and Democrats on the Hill break down. There is no evidence they have broken down. We continue to support that. We are involved in those efforts by providing technical assistance and providing them ideas and i hope Republicans and Democrats up there don’t get involved in a kind of typical Washington back-and-forth sideshow here and rather roll up their sleeves and get to work on writing a comprehensive immigration bill.

McDonough added on Meet the Press that the White House is doing what it always said it would do in “aggressively supporting” Hill negotiations, while developing its own back-up proposal that includes the core elements of comprehensive immigration reform: continued strengthening of the borders, crackdowns on businesses that game the system, a path to citizenship, and reasonable opportunities for legal immigration.

USA Today reports that Obama’s draft mirrors the 2007 bipartisan immigration proposal backed by President George W. Bush and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). But as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) admitted during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, Republicans are unlikely to support any plan with Obama’s name on it — even if it incorporates many of their own proposals.