The Obama administration will likely appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, ensuring immigration becomes a 2016 presidential campaign issue.
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Despite the court ruling, the Obama administration said it will continue to focus on deporting undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and will not change its policy to leave law-abiding undocumented immigrants with their families.
WASHINGTON – The Department of Justice plans to try to take the president’s deportation relief programs to the Supreme Court, it announced Tuesday, one day after an appeals court maintained a hold on the policies moving forward.
But now that a federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld a Texas-based federal judge’s injunction against the president’s plan this week, she’s not sure what will happen.
Republicans slammed the initiatives as executive overreach and a group of GOP-run states, led by Texas, sued to block them in federal court.
Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, who supports immigration reform, said that the ruling was disappointing but not surprising.
The appeals-court ruling was widely expected after a three-judge panel from the same court rejected in May the administration’s request to quickly throw a lifeline to the injunction.
The two programs, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, would expand legal work rights for the parents of undocumented children as well as for undocumented immigrants who entered the country illegally as children.
DACA, since 2012, has protected from deportation more than half a million young people who were brought into the country illegally as children, and DAPA, which still has not been implemented, would benefit the parents of us citizens or legal residents.
While the White House has yet to release an official response to the Fifth Circuit’s decision, a few officials have apparently quietly made their frustrations known around the nation’s capital.
The Obama administration argued that’s how it would roll out this program, but the court dismissed that argument.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott cheered the court’s ruling. As such, Obama is “merely moving them to the back of a very long line of potential deportees”, not granting amnesty to illegal immigrants, The Christian Science Monitor’s Warren Richey wrote in November 2014.
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It is unlikely the action will pass before Mr Obama leaves office because appeals often take months. Taking it to the Supreme Court.
