A ruling from the Supreme Court, which could come by next summer, is likely to be the last chance for Obama to begin carrying out the plan – known as Deferred Action for Parents of Americans – before handing the presidency to his successor in 2017, possibly to a Republican who could refuse to move forward.
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Harris’s record of supporting illegal aliens includes filing a 2012 brief against Arizona’s illegal immigration law, in which she argued that deciding which people to remove from the US and when to remove them was the province of the federal government; backing a 2014 bill that gave $3 million to nonprofits offering legal aid for illegal immigrant children; and offering consumer alerts for scams targeting illegal immigrants.
Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, which led the 26-state coalition that filed the lawsuit against the president’s actions, called the lower court decision a “vindication for the rule of law and the Constitution”.
In an opinion freighted with meaning for the separation of powers battles, Judge Jerry E. Smith, writing for himself and Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, said Mr. Obama hurt his own case when he claimed previous year that he acted to rewrite the law because Congress wouldn’t pass the bill he wanted. It justifies the programs in part by pointing out that Congress has provided funds to remove only about 400,000 undocumented immigrants per year, necessitating discretion in removals.
But case-by-case discretion is hard to apply to a potential class of more than 5 million people.
Texas and the other plaintiffs, for their part, say that the administration had failed to follow proper rulemaking procedure.
The Supreme Court can be expected to discount the disingenuous arguments of both sides, and it will not issue a ruling on the wisdom of Obama’s policy. “The injunction impairs the interests of California and our residents because we know that our state will substantially benefit from the president’s actions rather than be harmed”, according to the Sacramento Bee. He declared, “The president’s job is to enforce the immigration laws, not rewrite them”. The administration contends that the implementation of the DAPA and DACA is within the power of the executive branch, but Texas and 25 other states think otherwise.
Those are the questions the Supreme Court should attempt to answer. But it’s the Obama administration that has a concrete federal policy on the table.
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The program’s legality should be resolved before the high court’s current term ends next June. Latinos also overwhelmingly judge Republicans as responsible for obstructing an overhaul of immigration rules and strongly support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, an approach favoured by Obama and opposed by most Republican presidential candidates, he said.
