Supreme Court won’t revive Obama plan to shield illegal immigrants from deportation

[anatta]

The Supreme Court handed President Obama a significant legal defeat Thursday, refusing to revive his stalled plan to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and give them the right to work legally in the United States.

The court’s liberals and conservatives deadlocked, which leaves in place a lower court’s decision that the president exceeded his powers in issuing the directive.

The action deals Obama perhaps the biggest legal loss of his presidency and leaves in limbo about 4 million undocumented immigrants whom the initiative was intended to help: those who have been in the country since 2010, have committed no serious crimes, and have family ties to U.S. citizens or others lawfully in the United States.


Obama’s 2014 executive action came after Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The administration says the program is a way for a government with limited resources to prioritize which illegal immigrants it will deport.

As a practical matter, the government has never deported more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants per year and often sends home far fewer than that. But Texas, along with 25 other GOP-led states, challenged the action.


A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said the program was “much more than nonenforcement” and that the change in designation for the immigrants would trigger eligibility for federal and state benefits that would not otherwise be available.

The deadlock on the president’s deportation plan was the most serious consequence of the Supreme Court’s short-handed status. The delay in announcing the tie — the case was argued months ago — indicates the court tried to find a compromise that could draw five votes. The court has had only eight members since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, and Senate Republicans have said they will not act on Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland before the November election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...able-high_supreme-1045a-banner:homepage/story

 

[anatta]

panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said the program was “much more than nonenforcement” and that the change in designation for the immigrants would trigger eligibility for federal and state benefits that would not otherwise be available.

good. what is alarming is so-called well versed jurists do not see that Obama
was violating the separation of powers by "legislating" (gross over-ride of Congressional intent)

whatever you think of the issue,the process has to come first.

 

[anatta]

The case, United States v. Texas, No. 15-674, concerned an executive action by the president to allow as many as five million unauthorized immigrants who are the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program that would spare them from deportation and provide them with work permits. The program was called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA.

Mr. Obama has said he took action in 2014 after years of frustration with Republicans in Congress who had repeatedly refused to support bipartisan Senate legislation to update immigration laws. A coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, promptly challenged the plan, accusing the president of ignoring administrative procedures for changing rules and of abusing the power of his office by circumventing Congress.

Today’s decision keeps in place what we have maintained from the very start: one person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law,” Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement after the ruling. “This is a major setback to President Obama’s attempts to expand executive power, and a victory for those who believe in the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

For Mr. Obama, the ruling is a rebuke to his go-it-alone approach to immigration and effectively blocks any hope that his administration could protect millions of immigrants from the threat of deportation before he hands the presidency to his successor.


White House officials had repeatedly argued that presidents in both parties have used similar executive authority in applying the nation’s immigration laws. And they said Congress has granted federal law enforcement wide discretion over how those laws should be carried out.

But the court’s ruling most likely means that the next president will once again need to seek a congressional compromise to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. And it leaves immigration activists deeply disappointed.
++

In February 2015, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, Tex., entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program while the legal case proceeded. The government appealed, and a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans affirmed the injunction.

In their Supreme Court briefs, the states acknowledged that the president had wide authority over immigration matters, telling the justices that “the executive does have enforcement discretion to forbear from removing aliens on an individual basis.” Their quarrel, they said, was with what they called a blanket grant of “lawful presence” to millions of immigrants, entitling them to various benefits.

In response, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices that this “lawful presence” was merely what had always followed from the executive branch’s decision not to deport someone for a given period of time.

“Deferred action does not provide these individuals with any lawful status under the immigration laws,” he said. “But it provides some measure of dignity and decent treatment.”

“It recognizes the damage that would be wreaked by tearing apart families,” Mr. Verrilli added, “and it allows individuals to leave the shadow economy and work on the books to provide for their families, thereby reducing exploitation and distortion in our labor markets.”

The states said they had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave them standing to sue.





Judge Jerry E. Smith, writing for the majority in the appeals court, focused on an injury said to have been suffered by Texas, which he said would have to spend millions of dollars to provide driver’s licenses to immigrants as a consequence of the federal program.

Mr. Verrilli told the justices that Texas’ injury was self-inflicted, a product of its decision to offer driver’s licenses for less than they cost to produce and to tie eligibility for them to federal standards.

Texas responded that being required to change its laws was itself the sort of harm that conferred standing. “Such a forced change in Texas law would impair Texas’s sovereign interest in ‘the power to create and enforce a legal code,’” the state’s lawyers wrote in a brief.

Judge Hanen grounded his injunction on the Obama administration’s failure to give notice and seek public comments on its new program. He found that notice and comment were required because the program gave blanket relief to entire categories of people, notwithstanding the administration’s assertion that it required case-by-case determinations about who was eligible for the program.

The appeals court affirmed that ruling and added a broader one. The program, it said, also exceeded Mr. Obama’s statutory authority.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...able-high_supreme-1045a-banner:homepage/story

 

[anatta]

so much for Hillary's promise to use more executive action on immigration,, although who knows if this would stop her from trying.
Put another liberal judge in there, and you can kiss separation of powers goodbye

 

[NOVA]

Shows how important it is that Clinton not be elected to the presidency....

We already have a SC that will not do its job in upholding the Constitution.

Its time to unite and stop her. Stop listening to the anti Trump propaganda.

 

[anatta]

Shows how important it is that Clinton not be elected to the presidency....

We already have a SC that will not do its job in upholding the Constitution.

Its time to unite and stop her. Stop listening to the anti Trump propaganda.

ya. "The Constitution is just a gaddamn piece of paper" (shrub)
Both partys are a million miles from textulism.
However the Dems are insane when it comes to gross over-reach of fed'l powers (balance) as well as separation of powers

 

[Legion Troll]

We need more copycat threads about this.

One isn't enough.