A 4-4 split by justices would leave in place a lower court’s decision blocking Obama’s action in a severe blow to the president.
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The roughly 4 million undocumented immigrants who’d benefit from the programs could now be in limbo, Kalhan said.
A total of 26 states are suing, saying President Obama has overstepped his legal authority on immigration. “DAPA and the expanded DACA programs are the latest in the long struggle for immigrant rights in this country that should have ended with comprehensive immigration reform legislation in Congress, which the Senate passed with bipartisan support in 2013”, said Suman Raghunathan, executive director of SAALT.
Obama announced the executive orders in November 2014, but a Texas court froze the plan months later, sending it to the Supreme Court.
In an important exchange with Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller, Justice Kagan extracted a concession that the state of Texas’s main objection wasn’t to the label “deferred action” or even “lawfully present”, so much as the consequences of that status, primarily the ability to seek work authorization. “And yet, once here, they want us to be like the country they came from, where we don’t enforce the law across the board”. He faced skeptical questions from the court’s more liberal members about whether his state had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave it standing to sue. “That’s upside down”, as quoted by Bloomberg News.
In order to win, Obama would need the support of one of the court’s conservatives, most likely Chief Justice John Roberts or Anthony Kennedy.
Reid said the Supreme Court “must do the right thing and recognize President Obama’s authority”. Obama administration lawyers say the deferred deportation practices are not binding rules subject to the Administrative Procedure Act.
Now, she would like the same for herself and her husband, a trained accountant who works construction jobs. Texas and the other states that brought the lawsuit say Obama, in taking executive action that bypassed Congress, crossed that line because Congress is in charge of deciding who is a lawful or unlawful immigrant. He seemed to side with Texas, which argued the state had standing because it would be harmed by the actions as it would cost more money to issue driver’s licenses to people in the country illegally. But on Monday, the justices were focused on two very different, legally consequential questions about the division of power between the federal government, the states and Congress.
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When the court agreed in January to hear the case, it raised the possibility of a broad decision by taking the unusual step of asking the parties to address whether Obama had violated his constitutional obligations to enforce the nation’s laws.
