Fred Inconsistent on Immigration?

The Christian Science Monitor has found two instances where Fred helped immigrants from being deported when he was in the Senate. They cast this as being inconsistent with his current position on immigration. But let's take a little look at what is really going on here:

In 1999, he pleaded with the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to reinstate a green-card application from a Korean family who became illegal when their visas expired. In 2000, Thompson passed a private law to grant green cards – or permanent residence – to a disabled Bolivian widow and three of her children. Under public law, the family would have had to leave the United States.

The episodes reveal a greater open-mindedness toward immigrants in legal limbo than has been evident from Thompson on the campaign trail.

Let's handle the easy one first--the Korean family had not arrived illegally, but had a visa expire and he worked to get the visa reinstated. I think this is quite consistent with his expressed frustration with the immigration process. These folk had played by the rules and the rules were beginning to hurt them. He operated as a good Senator or Representative should and made sure that the governmental process worked for them.

The second story is quite a dramatic story. That family had come for treatments for their son (legally with a visa) and various tragedies happened to their family while in the U.S. and while they were still receiving treatment their visas were going to expire and they would have to leave. Fred intervened with a "private bill" that allowed them to get the status they needed in order to stay in the U.S. and receive treatments.

Somehow the CSM fails to understand Fred's position on immigration. Fred's folk tried to straighten them out, but they cannot help themselves:

Since entering the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Thompson, who left the Senate in 2002, has been one of the GOP field's most outspoken advocates for the strict enforcement of existing immigration laws. Among other things, his immigration proposal calls for a ban on legal status for illegal immigrants and an end to the preference for adult children of US citizens. That preference set the Lees on a path to citizenship.

"What he did then was work with individuals who had entered the country legally and were in extreme humanitarian and family crises," a Thompson spokesman, Jeff Sadosky, said Friday. Asked whether Thompson would help such families in the same way now, Mr. Sadosky said, "Senator Thompson is always willing to do what he can, openly and in complete accordance with the law, for those law-abiding persons who face exceptionally challenging situations."

The campaign did not answer questions about seeming inconsistencies between his actions as a senator and his current policy proposals.

Simply stated: Fred is for legal immigration and is willing to help and work with those who come in legally and then have issues. But he is not willing to help and work with those who come in illegally.

What's so hard folk?