Thread: Here’s What Happened At The Federal Appeals Court Hearing Over Obama’s Immigration

Here’s What Happened At The Federal Appeals Court Hearing Over Obama’s Immigration Actions

The court heard arguments Friday that focused on whether Texas and other states can sue to stop Obama’s 2014 Deferred Action for Parents of Americans executive order.

posted on Jul. 10, 2015, at 12:58 p.m.
John Stanton BuzzFeed News Reporter
David NoriegaBuzzFeed News Reporter



Gerald Herbert / AP

NEW ORLEANS — A federal appeals court heard arguments Friday over President Obama’s plan to defer the deportation of potentially millions of undocumented immigrants, leaving the plan on hold at least until it rules.

As the three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals questioned the Texas and Justice Department lawyers Friday morning, hundreds of immigrants and their supporters held a raucous Second Line parade outside the courthouse that repeatedly interrupted the proceedings.

A district court judge in Texas this winter halted implementation of Obama’s 2014 Deferred Action for Parents of Americans executive order, which would have provided deportation waivers for certain undocumented workers if they meet specific criteria.

The three-judge panel did not rule on the administration’s argument that the case —brought by Texas and more than two dozen other states — should be dismissed because they lacked standing to sue, or on the underlying question of whether the administration had the authority to implement the new plan, and the court did not say when a decision will be released.

While it is unclear how the court will rule, Judge Carolyn Dineen King appeared sympathetic to the administration’s arguments, particularly on the underlying legality of DAPA, repeatedly pressing Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller over the issue of work permits, which is at the center of the conservative complaints about the order.

Although Keller acknowledged there are a handful of specific instances in statutory language in which the Department of Homeland Security can provide work permits to recipients of a deportation deferment, King repeatedly and pointedly asked whether states see any discretionary authority. At one point as Keller seemed to dodge answering King head on, the judge said “I understand the state doesn’t want that to happen … you don’t want [undocumented immigrants] to be able to get work permits” before throwing up her hands, forcing Keller to concede her point.

Judge Jennifer Elrod, however, remained clearly skeptical of the administration’s legal authority. Picking up the states’ argument that the White House is conferring a legal status on the undocumented, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Benjamin Mizer struggled to answer her repeated questions about where the authority lies for the administration to declare them lawfully in the United States.

Elrod’s skepticism was somewhat predictable, as she and Judge Jerry Smith — who also heard today’s oral arguments — rejected a DOJ request to lift the stay on implementing DAPA that was based on largely the same arguments. As in the hearing on that motion, Smith remained largely inscrutable, asking only a handful of questions during the more than two hour-long hearing.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s recent redistricting ruling could impact the DAPA case. The states pointed to the high court’s ruling that the Arizona legislature had standing to sue the independent redistricting commission to bolster their standing claim, which is at the heart of the early legal wrangling over the policy.

Throughout the course of the legal challenge to Obama’s executive action, both sides have asserted that the expect an eventual victory.

But so far the Obama administration and its supporters have been dealt only losses, first by Judge Andrew Hanen in the district court in Brownsville and then by a 5th Circuit panel that, like the one today, was dominated by conservative judges.

In the meantime, the federal government has stopped preparing to unroll the programs, and some immigrant advocates have begun to worry that the legal challenge may succeed — if not by winning in the courts, then at least by running out the clock. “I was looking at the timeline, and it hit me even harder,” Julio Zuniga, president of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, told BuzzFeed News in June. “The longest the appeal could go might be over a year. So that means that elections are going to pass, and that means that with a new president, the executive order could be stopped or eliminated.”

In turn, the opponents of Obama’s actions have grown emboldened. “On the merits, this case is a slam dunk for the plaintiffs,” Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and a leading opponent of Obama’s immigration policies, told BuzzFeed News. “I think many attorneys in the Justice Department realize what a difficult legal case they have.”

From the beginning of the challenge, immigrant advocates have blamed these setbacks on what they call “venue-shopping,” saying Texas and its fellow plaintiffs specifically chose Judge Hanen’s district and the 5th Circuit for its predominantly conservative judges.

John Wittman, a spokesperson for Texas Governor Greg Abbott, countered that the case may have also landed with a Clinton-appointed judge in the same court, and that the court’s location made it a suitable venue. “The lawsuit was appropriately filed in Brownsville, Texas, as it was the epicenter of border crossings following Obama’s executive order,” Wittman said.

Still, some advocates were heartened by Judge King’s aggressive questioning of the plaintiffs on whether they were motivated by a desire to prevent undocumented immigrants from obtaining work permits.

“Some of the questions that were raised in court today really brought to light what we think is the crux of the matter,” said Karen Tumlin, managing attorney for the Los Angeles office the National Immigration Law Center. “Do we want to be a country that includes people or excludes them?”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnstanton/...bam#.kmQ8oWlqQ

Based upon what I was taught compared to statements that are made by ones who made it to school twenty years later than I, I see no question that schools today are not advocating for America or Americans. That does not bode will for any of us including the ones they advocate for.

Where in America is Karen Tumlun of LA going to house, feed and provide medical care for all those aliens coming in addition to those here now. How large will the warehouses for the elderly need to be? Is it that educated people remember what the professor said, but the professor did not teach reasoning?

http://www.alipac.us/f12/amnesty-gro...uments-321088/

Immigration Case Judge Questions ‘Disingenuous’ Work Permits

By Andrew M Harris
Jul 10, 2015 9:33 AM PDT

A key portion of President Barack Obama’s immigration plan was questioned by two of three appeals court judges deciding whether to let it take effect.

U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod, a Republican appointee, sharply quizzed administration lawyers Friday about a provision that would give as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants legal status in the U.S.

The plan “doesn’t give work authorization but gives prelude to work authorization,” Elrod said. “Isn’t that kind of disingenuous?”

The administration is asking the New Orleans appeals court to set aside a judge’s order that put the program on hold while he considers whether the president has the power to change immigration policy unilaterally. The 26 states suing to block the plan argue that allowing the immigrants to remain in the U.S. while the case is being decided would be irreversible, making any later victory for them meaningless.

Waiting for a final decision on the president’s authority might kill the program by delaying it until the end of Obama’s term, or even after it.

Illegal immigration is already a central issue in the early stages of the 2016 presidential race with Republican contender Donald Trump’s recent comments that many who cross the U.S. border from Mexico are drug dealers and rapists.

Harsh Rhetoric

While Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus has urged Trump to tone down his rhetoric, the real estate mogul has surged to the fore of some presidential polls.

As the two-hour appellate court hearing progressed, people backing the president’s immigration policy demonstrated outside, their chants audible in the courtroom.

On Tuesday, the Brownsville, Texas, federal judge whose order is being appealed threatened to cite Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with contempt over his department’s failure to immediately reclaim 2,000 extended work authorizations issued after the program was ordered halted.

Thursday, the agency disclosed it had mistakenly issued 500 additional permits after the order was issued.

The administration’s deferred-action initiative would block deportations and provide work permits to immigrants who have been in the country for five years, if they were brought to the U.S. as children or have a child who is a citizen. Those seeking to qualify must pass a criminal background check.

The suing states, led by Texas, argue the policy change is tantamount to lawmaking, which is the job of Congress.

Work Eligibility

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Benjamin Mizer was also questioned Friday by U.S. Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, another Republican appointee, about whether work eligibility for those who enter the country unlawfully amounted to something more than the government’s traditional ability to prioritize who can stay and who must go.

Those policies put the undocumented immigrants “one step ahead in being eligible for lots of potential benefits,” Smith said. “It seems like it’s a lot more than prosecutorial discretion.”

Mizer replied that deferred action by the U.S. doesn’t automatically provide eligibility for such benefits.

It only “eliminated one barrier,” he said.

Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller told the panel the suing states will be harmed if the president’s policies are allowed to take effect, as they’d result in undocumented immigrants gaining lawful presence in the U.S and becoming eligible for emergency Medicaid and other health-care benefits.

Economic Well-Being

“States can protect the economic well-being of their citizens,” Keller said, addressing contentions that those he represents can’t show they deserve compensation for an injury.

The president’s immigration plan doesn’t create any new benefits, said Marielena Hincapie, executive director for the National Immigration Law Center, who attended Friday’s hearing.

Immigrants would “be eligible later” for benefits such as Medicaid and Social Security, if they meet other criteria under state and federal laws, Hincapie said.

U.S. Circuit Judge Carolyn King, the lone Democratic appointee to the panel, was skeptical.

The states aren’t “contesting their ability to stay here. They can stay,” King said. “What you don’t want them to do is able to work.”

“That’s the key,” she added.

Mizer conceded that lawful presence would be the “inevitable consequence” of the plan.

He also told the judges, “The term lawful presence doesn’t have a single meaning in immigration law. It certainly doesn’t have some magical benefit as implied by Texas.”

The appeal is Texas v. U.S., 15-40238, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (New Orleans). The lower-court case is Texas v. U.S., 1:14-00254, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas (Brownsville).

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/ar...migration-plan

By JULIA PRESTON
JULY 10, 2015

NEW ORLEANS — Government lawyers labored on Friday to persuade federal appeals court judges here to allow President Obama to move ahead with sweeping initiatives to protect immigrants in the country illegally. But the judges’ questions seemed to make it ever more unlikely that the president’s programs, which he has hoped would be a central piece of his legacy, would start any time before the last months of his term, if at all.

A panel of three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard arguments in a lawsuit by Texas and 25 other states challenging executive actions Mr. Obama announced in November that would give temporary reprieves from deportation to as many as four million immigrants and also permit them to work.

In February, a federal district judge in Texas blocked the programs. On May 26, a panel of the Fifth Circuit denied the administration’s emergency request to cancel that injunction, with two judges supporting the denial and one dissenting. This time, the judges heard a broader appeal by the government on the challenge to the executive actions.


Police officers arrested protesters after hundreds of people staged a sit-in at an intersection to bring attention to immigration reform. Credit Edmund D. Fountain for The New York Times

But even though the judges issued no decision on Friday, it seemed highly probable that the administration would lose. By a stroke of bad luck for Mr. Obama and good fortune for the states bringing the lawsuit, two judges on Friday’s panel — Judge Jerry E. Smith and Judge Jennifer Elrod — are the same conservatives who ruled against the administration in May. Court officials said both panels had been randomly selected, well before the administration even brought its case to the Fifth Circuit.

A setback now would be decisively damaging to the president’s argument that he has full authority to carry out the vast programs nationwide and would leave the administration little choice but to take the case to the high-stakes and slow-moving deliberations of the Supreme Court and to hope for a favorable ruling before the end of its term in June of next year.

Mr. Obama has run into far deeper legal trouble than officials anticipated when they decided last year to create a program by executive action, without approval by Congress, extending deportation deferrals and work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants who are parents of American citizens or legal residents.

Judges Smith and Elrod peppered the government’s lawyer, Benjamin C. Mizer, a principal deputy assistant attorney general, with skeptical questions about his contention that the administration had ample authority to focus immigration enforcement on deporting immigrants who commit crimes or threaten national security, and to defer deportations of those who pose little risk to public safety and have families in the United States.

Referring to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, Judge Elrod asked, with a note of incredulity, “So the secretary has boundless discretion to give work authorization to whomever he wants and it is not constrained by congressional law?”

The administration’s arguments about the president’s powers have faltered over Texas driver’s licenses. Texas has said it would be a burden to have to pay at least $130 each for driver’s licenses for as many as 500,000 unauthorized immigrants who could obtain the licenses if they received deferrals under the president’s programs. Judge Smith, in his 42-page opinion in May, agreed.

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But Scott Keller, the solicitor general of Texas who argued for the states, drew concern from all three judges when he said Mr. Obama’s programs were not only a “sweeping assertion of executive power” but were breaking the law. His arguments raised complex new issues for the judges to consider this time around, probably extending the time before they rule.

The judge who sided with the administration in May, Stephen A. Higginson, was not on the panel on Friday. The third member was Carolyn D. King, nominated in 1979 by President Carter, and formerly chief judge of the Fifth Circuit. She sharply questioned Mr. Keller, the Texas lawyer.

Jurists and legal experts familiar with procedures in the Fifth Circuit court said it was coincidence — and very unusual — that the two panels hearing different phases of the immigration lawsuit included two of the same judges. Judge Smith is an outspoken conservative who has wrangled publicly with Mr. Obama over the extent of the president’s powers.

Court officials said the chief judge, Carl E. Stewart, was so concerned it might appear that the court had acted improperly to influence the immigration case that he ordered a clerk to flip a coin in the presence of witnesses to decide which of two panels scheduled to hear cases this week would handle the Texas lawsuit.

The debate in the hushed, elegant courtroom was overwhelmed several times by the sounds of drums and horns from about 600 protesters from immigrant rights groups in the street outside, including people who traveled from California, Arizona, Texas and Alabama.

A smaller group sat down in the street in front of the offices nearby of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. A spokesman for the protesters said 14 people were arrested, but were quickly released.

“People are still getting deported every day,” said Saket Soni, the executive director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. He said the demonstrations were intended to “supply hope to the movement and signal to ICE there is much more of this coming.”

The administration has faced even more serious legal trouble with the federal district judge in the case, Andrew S. Hanen. He has chastised officials for failing to inform him that more than 100,000 deferrals with extended three-year terms had been issued under the president’s programs to young immigrants before he imposed the injunction. He ordered the government to cancel the deferrals and collect about 2,000 work cards that were also granted.

Infuriated that the administration had not collected every card, on Tuesday, Judge Hanen issued an unusually harsh rebuke, calling the officials’ conduct “unacceptable and completely unprofessional.” In an action federal judges rarely take, he ordered the secretary of Homeland Security, Mr. Johnson, to appear in person in his Brownsville court on Aug. 19 to explain why the judge should not find him in contempt.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us...ourt.html?_r=0

In my court of common sense at some point in history American courts have to, must recognize that in a nation of laws, the executive branch cannot be allowed to arbitrarily interpret or write law and edicts. That portion of government must remain with the people, as determined by their elected and empowered representatives.

For universal understanding is that too simple?

by John Hayward
12 Jul 2015

If the rule of law still meant anything in Obama’s America, the President’s agenda of amnesty for illegal aliens would be in big trouble. It doesn’t, so the Administration just keeps pumping out amnesty documents, no matter how often federal courts order them to stop.

Team Obama even stooped to flat-out lying to a federal judge about the need for a temporary injunction to stop the amnesty printing press. Later they made a “surprise filing” to the judge disclosing that their previous statements were false, and – whoopsie! – they had already tossed 100,000 amnesty packages out.

So the news from Politico that “President Barack Obama appears likely to lose – again – in the protracted legal fight over his executive actions on immigration” doesn’t really mean much.

This all has nothing to do with laws, courts, elections, or the will of the American people. It’s a pure exercise in absolute tyranny. The Ruling Class has decided to import a new electorate, a perfect combination of cheap labor for Big Business and reliable Big Government votes for Democrats. No court, no vote, no crime wave, and no outcry from legitimate American citizens is going to stop them.

It’s all about using executive fiat to change the facts on the ground quickly. By the time courts and voters catch up, riding upon the relatively slow rails of legal and electoral process, hundreds of thousands of people will have been given citizenship and welfare benefits that cannot be taken away from them.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here’s the latest rusty shriek of outrage from the obsolete legal system:

Two of the three appeals court judges who heard oral arguments Friday on the Obama administration’s immigration programs were skeptical about the legal merits of the directive, which could halt deportations for more than 4 million immigrants here illegally who have family ties in the United States.

The chilly reception from the three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on whether Obama had legal authority to take such action seems to indicate that a lower court decision blocking the new programs would stay in place.

The Obama administration has argued that the executive actions were a standard use of prosecutorial discretion, since the federal government does not have the resources to deport the estimated 11 million immigrants here illegally. But Judge Jerry Smith disputed that contention.

“It puts them one step ahead in terms of being eligible for lots of potential benefits, whether those are Social Security and Medicare, work authorization, earned income tax credits, and on the state level, drivers’ licenses,” Smith said of immigrants who would benefit from Obama’s actions. “Just seems to me that … it really is a lot more than prosecutorial discretion.”

As for the judge who was deceived and defied by the Administration, District Judge Andrew Hanen in Texas, he still seems to be operating under the impression that some sort of “law” applies to King Barack I and his imported supplicants. He ordered the Administration to rescind 2,000 work permits for illegals issued in defiance of his orders, and they simply ignored him. In fact, they issued another 500 three-year work permits after his block orders were handed down.

When last U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was heard from on the matter, they said they had been reduced to “pleading with the illegal immigrants to return the three-year cards,” but “they are having trouble getting some of the lucky recipients to send them back,” according to the Washington Times.

What an amazing spectacle!

People who broke the law and occupied the United States illegally are refusing to give back the work permits they were issued in error… and the almighty Leviathan State, the same government that will bring its boot down on your neck if you dream of defying ObamaCare or gay marriage orders, just shrugs and whines about how tough it is to persuade those who didn’t surrender their illegitimate permits immediately.

It’s supposedly impossible to enforce U.S. immigration law because illegals were elusive figures who “live in the shadows” and can’t be found once they cross the border. It sounds like the government has no trouble at all finding them when it wants to hand out goodie bags.

Politico writes that Judge Hanen has now ordered “Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and other top immigration officials to appear before him in August to explain why the administration keeps issuing work permits for undocumented immigrants under criteria that are currently blocked under Hanen’s order.”

That ought to be good for a bit of amusing courtroom theater, assuming anyone from King Barack’s royal court bothers to show up. Actually the Politico article suggests the judge is already starting to get the picture about how utterly meaningless the rule of law is to Obama’s amnesty express, and ameliorating his demands: “Hanen had said he’d be willing to dismiss his demand for Johnson to appear before him in court if he’s satisfied with the steps that the administration takes to revoke the three-year permits. The Obama administration said in the Thursday court filing that it would file a status report on July 31 about how the government is trying to correct those issues.”

So the judge will settle for a bit of bureaucratic cheese on July 31, prepared by the same people who lied to his face in their previous “status report,” while work permits and other citizenship freebies keep flowing, more illegals stroll across the porous border, and the American people are told their desire for security and respectable citizenship has been forever checkmated.

Sorry, folks, it turns out you needed to demand action – and vote in vast numbers almost exclusively on that basis – twenty or thirty years ago if you wanted secure borders and serious citizenship laws, and even then you would have needed a flock of federal judges orbiting several successive Administrations like hawks to make it stick.

It’s a bit uncomfortable for the illegal immigration caucus that a few high-profile murders by illegal aliens are threatening to awaken the public to the dangers of their agenda, including one committed by a twice-deported illegal just a few miles from the nominal home of the leading Democrat candidate for President, Hillary Clinton. It’s providing an unexpected boost for the only presidential candidate thus far willing to discuss the issue frankly, Donald Trump – in part because he’s getting a white-hot media spotlight from “journalists” who think they can paint him as a xenophobe, and spread the smear to the rest of the Republican Party.

But at the end of the day, the facts on the ground are being changed, the rule of law has been degraded – perhaps beyond repair, from the look of these “sanctuary cities” and their flagrant defiance of the law, under congressional majorities both Republican and Democrat – and a beaten American public will be intimidated into accepting the amnesty agenda, in part because they will be assured every alternative program is utterly unthinkable. Funny how sometimes court decisions “settle the law of the land” and decisively end arguments, to the point where free speech must be annihilated to silence all remaining dissent, while other times they don’t matter at all.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...at-it-matters/