Supreme Court deadlocks, dooming Obama deportation amnesty
Supreme Court deadlocks, dooming Obama deportation amnesty
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Guatemalan immigrant Amariliz Ortiz holds a doll as she joins families impacted by the immigration raids during a rally with Members of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, CHIRLA, outside the ICE Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown ... more >
By Stephen Dinan -
The Washington Times -
Updated: 10:58 a.m. on Thursday, June 23, 2016
President Obama lost his bid to kick-start his deportation amnesty after the Supreme Court deadlocked 4-4 on Thursday, keeping in place a lower court’s ruling that stopped the White House plans to grant work permits to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants.
The ruling was cheered by conservatives who said Mr. Obama tried to subvert the Constitution. But immigrant-rights advocates called it a miscarriage of justice, saying illegal immigrants will continue to struggle to live and work in the shadows of American life.
In the near term, the decision is a devastating blow to Mr. Obama’s hopes of a legacy-burnishing step on immigration. But it could have been worse — had the late Justice Antonin Scalia still be on the court, analysts said Mr. Obama would likely have lost in 5-4 decision that could have spanked him for overstepping his constitutional bounds.
Instead, the tie decision leaves in place the ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that rules Mr. Obama broke immigration law.
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan said the ruling restores some of the constitutional balance of powers that Mr. Obama has upset during his eight years in office.
“The Supreme Court’s ruling makes the president’s executive action on immigration null and void. The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws — only Congress is. This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers,” Mr. Ryan said.
Immigrant-rights advocates, meanwhile, had feared the ruling, and have vowed to take the issue to voters in November, saying Republicans — who generally opposed the amnesty — will suffer at the ballot box.
They also said the pressure is now on Mr. Obama to halt all deportations, arguing that the system has become so unfair that he should impose a moratorium to force Congress to rewrite the laws.
“The way to keep communities from living in fear is to put a freeze on deportations,” said Marisa Franco, director of the activist group Mijente. “With the courts also taken over by the party politics that have ruled the immigration issue for more than a decade, President Obama has a responsibility to pursue alternatives to make his policies more humane.”
The justices do not release opinions in deadlocked cases, and they don’t even say who voted on each side — though based on oral argument, it’s fairly certain the four justices appointed by Democratic presidents sided with the administration and the GOP-appointed justices sided with Texas and the 25 other states that sued to stop the amnesty.
Mr. Obama’s program would have applied to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants who either came to the U.S. as children or who have children that are citizens or legal residents. The administration argued that those ties were so deep that they might have eventually qualified for a path to citizenship, so it made no sense to deport them.
Instead, under the program, they were to be granted three-year proactive stays of deportation and to be given work permits, entitling them to Social Security numbers and other taxpayer benefits.
Lower courts had repeatedly ruled the president didn’t have the unilateral power to take such action, and put the program on hold.
Before his 2014 reversal, Mr. Obama himself had repeatedly said he didn’t have the power to grant such a broad amnesty, saying such a claim would make him a “king,” not a president.
He began to change his mind after he and Congress deadlocked on legislation to grant the chance at full citizenship rights to most illegal immigrants.
In November 2014, after overseeing massive defeats for Democrats in the mid-term congressional elections, Mr. Obama announced he’d been mistaken and that he did, in fact, possess broad powers to grant tentative legal status to illegal immigrants. His legal advisers said he could use “deferred action” on anyone who had a speculative path to legal status in the future — in this case, millions of parents with children who are in the U.S. legally.
Texas led 25 other states in suing, arguing they would bear the economic costs of having to issue driver’s licenses, pay for schooling and cover health care costs for those granted tentative status.
U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen sides with Texas, halting the program. An appeals court twice agreed, in separate 2-1 opinions.
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