On Thursday night, President Obama will give a speech at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) gala as he looks to rebuild support in the Latino community. It’s an important speech, because Obama has taken a lot of heat over the past few months for his handling of immigration issues, which could hurt Democrats in the midterms.

Obama has certainly made some mistakes over the past couple months. Republicans, naturally, have tried to use them for political gain. In July, for instance, Representative Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said, "The administration must first recognize its failed immigration and border policies are the source of the problem.” The worst criticism hasn't come from the GOP, though. It's come from immigration advocates. One activist, Arturo Carmona, said a few weeks ago, "for Obama, politics come before Latino lives."

But these critiques both overstate Obama's errors and ignore his successes. Altogether, his recent immigration record is much stronger than it appears.

Hispanics are particularly angry with the president for delaying his executive action on immigration until after the midterm elections. He had originally promised such an action would come at the end of the summer. It’s clear the delay is a political decision, made to spare struggling Democratic senatorial candidates running in states where conservative voters would be outraged. "When your supposed friends break multiple promises, it feels really shitty,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigration advocacy group. “That's just a basic human reaction.” Obama certainly should have handled this much better. If there was a chance he’d back away from his promise because of the political consequences of his action, he shouldn’t have made it last spring. And there is undoubtedly a human cost to this delay: some undocumented immigrants will be deported who wouldn’t have been otherwise.

Still, the apoplectic response his announcement provoked from immigration activists may overstate the true consequences of the delay. Based on the 2013 pace of deportations, 60,600 undocumented immigrants would be deported between September 5 (when Obama announced the delay) and election day. That’s a lot, but we can’t know how many would have qualified for deferred action until Obama reveals the details of his executive action. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security is focusing its resources on deporting high-priority undocumented immigrants like those with criminal records. Immigration activists don’t believe that DHS is actually following through on those priorities, but 59 percent of deportations in 2013 had a criminal record. In other words, the majority of those 60,600 undocumented immigrants would have been deported even if Obama did not delay his executive action.