Thread: Obama administration reverses course on ICE agents’ lawsuit

By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times
Tuesday, May 7, 2013


Photo by: Matt York
**FILE** An illegal immigrant from El Salvador is searched June 26, 2012, on the tarmac at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport in Mesa, Ariz., as the sun rises prior to boarding an MD-80 aircraft for a repatriation flight of 80 immigrants to their home country. (Associated Press)

The Obama administration said Monday it’s willing to subject its new non-deportation policies to collective bargaining with the labor union that represents immigration agents — a reversal that comes as the Homeland Security Department tries to head off a potentially devastating defeat in court.

At stake is whether the department can force agents to not arrest illegal immigrants they encounter. That’s at the crux of the new Obama administration policies preventing most rank-and-file illegal immigrants from being deported, which the administration says has helped focus efforts on more dangerous criminal aliens.

A federal district judge in Texas last month ruled that the law requires agents to arrest all illegal immigrants they find, but he delayed implementing the ruling because he said it’s not clear that a court is the right place to decide the matter. He asked them both to file briefs exploring whether the issue should have been decided at the collective bargaining table instead.

Late last year Christopher Crane, the chief of the union, asked for collective bargaining but the administration turned him down, saying it was a management decision, not an area for negotiations.

Now, though, the administration says it not only wants to go through collective bargaining, but said that’s what the law requires.

“Channeling such disputes through the process established by the [Civil Service Reform Act] — and not allowing them to proceed directly in district court — is required even where the government employees’ lawsuit purports to be a ‘systemic challenge’ to government policy, rather than a challenge to a disciplinary action,” the administration lawyers said in their filing with the court.

Kris W. Kobach, the lawyer for the ICE union, said the administration is “looking for any way to push this case out of federal court” and are contradicting themselves to do it.

“Their argument is unsustainable as a matter of law, and remarkable in that it so clearly contradicts their client’s position,” he wrote in his own filing with the court.

Mr. Crane says agents and officers have been told if they ignore the order they will be subject to discipline.

The Obama administration has said it is using “prosecutorial discretion” to decide which illegal immigrants to put in deportation proceedings.

ICE Director John Morton issued a policy in 2011 directing that only the most serious criminals be put in deportation, and then last year President Obama announced a policy telling agents to stop deporting illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. before age 16.

But Judge Reed O'Connor issued an order last month that said the administration cannot ignore the law, which directs ICE agents and officers to arrest illegal immigrants. He said the administration could still exercise discretion later in the process to drop deportation proceedings.

Halting deportations of most rank-and-file immigrants has been central to the administration’s new policy.

Officials argue they are still deporting a record number of immigrants, though data introduced in the ICE agents’ lawsuit actually shows those numbers have been padded by deportations of recent arrivals at the border, rather than deportations from within the interior of the U.S.

Illegal immigrants within the interior of the U.S. run very little risk of being deported unless they are convicted of a major crime.

If Judge O'Connor sides with the agents, it will mean the administration will have to affirmatively decide to release them later — which could raise the stakes if one of those illegal immigrants who is released later commits a crime.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...gents-lawsuit/

The time for Collective Bargaining is long past!

We need the ICE union to stick to their guns and beat Obama's unconstitutional orders in court to set a national precedent!

W