Laurel Brubaker Calkins
By Laurel Brubaker Calkins
President Barack Obama drew the short straw in a lawsuit by 25 states seeking to block efforts to loosen immigration restrictions: The judge who will decide the case has previously assailed him in that arena for turning “a blind eye to criminal conduct.”
Justice Department lawyers Wednesday urged the court to preserve Obama’s executive order allowing 4 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the US They filed their request with US District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, asking him to refuse the call by half of the US states to delay implementation of the program until their court challenge is decided.
Hanen may prove a tough sell. The judge, whose courthouse is located on the Mexican border in Brownsville, accused the Department of Homeland Security last year of complicity in cross-border child smuggling.
“The DHS should enforce the laws of the United States — not break them,” Hanen said in a written opinion.
Hanen, who was appointed by Republican George W. Bush in 2002, rebuked the agency for “completing the criminal conspiracy” by delivering undocumented children caught at the border to their parents living illegally in the US The judge complained in a December 2013 opinion that the undocumented parents weren’t arrested or deported after being reunited with their kids, and taxpayers were footing the transit bills.
The biggest beneficiaries of the conspiracy, Hanen said, are the Mexican drug cartels that control the border smuggling rings, who’ve learned to rely on the US government to “finish the job of the human traffickers” if they get caught.
“Instead of enforcing the law of the United States, the government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it,” Hanen wrote in his opinion that followed a string of child-trafficking convictions in his court. “A private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted for this conduct.”
The Obama administration urged Hanen Wednesday to deny the states’ attempt to prevent the new immigration policy from taking effect, arguing that the federal government has broad discretionary authority under the US Constitution to “prioritise enforcement resources” however the president sees fit.
“At its core, plaintiffs’ suit is a generalized disagreement about the scope of the prosecutorial discretion of the executive branch of the federal government, in the exercise of exclusive federal authority over immigration,” government lawyers said in a filing in the Brownsville court.
That authority, under prior rulings of the Supreme Court, includes the right to “decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all, including because of immediate human concerns,” White Houe lawyers said.
Immigration officials must focus their limited resources on deporting criminals and recent border-crossers, because Congress singled these groups out for priority handling without providing sufficient funding to accomplish the job, the White House said in the filing.
By shifting away from “low-priority aliens,” DHS can spend more on rounding up dangerous immigrants and those without family ties to the US, they said.
The Obama administration told Hanen it believes judges don’t have authority to decide if the president abused his power by changing immigration laws singlehandedly, without Congressional approval.
Under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, “an agency’s decision not to exercise its enforcement authority, or to exercise it in a particular way, is presumed to be immune from judicial review,” White House lawyers said in court papers.
A federal judge in Washington Tuesday threw out an Arizona sheriff’s challenge to the immigration policy change, ruling that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix didn’t have legal grounds to question the Obama administration’s decisions. White House lawyers urged Hanen to do the same with the multi-state challenge.
Last week, after US District Judge Arthur J. Schwab in Pittsburgh called Obama’s order unconstitutional, saying it “goes beyond prosecutorial discretion,” the Justice Department issued a rare public rebuke of the judiciary, saying Schwab is “flatly wrong.”
Hanen, in the middle of his 10-page opinion last year, said he “takes no position on the topic of immigration reform” and his opinion shouldn’t be read as a commentary on a “matter of much political debate.” He went on to assail Department of Homeland Security policies, alternately calling them “dangerous” and “failing.”
Texas, which is leading the multistate challenge to Obama’s immigration policy, chose to file its case in the state’s southernmost tip. Brownsville has a front-row seat at the “humanitarian crisis” that has swept more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants a day — many of them unaccompanied children — across Texas’s border in the past year, according to the complaint.
Brownsville has just two federal judges — Hanen and an appointee of Democratic ex-President Bill Clinton — and they evenly split all incoming civil cases, according to the court’s website and a courthouse clerk who confirmed the case-assignment protocol but declined to give her name.
“The assignments are random” between Hanen and the other judge, Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, said in an emailed response to questions on how Texas decided where to file the case.
Bean had no comment on Wednesday’s filing.WP-BLOOMBERG
By Laurel Brubaker Calkins
President Barack Obama drew the short straw in a lawsuit by 25 states seeking to block efforts to loosen immigration restrictions: The judge who will decide the case has previously assailed him in that arena for turning “a blind eye to criminal conduct.”
Justice Department lawyers Wednesday urged the court to preserve Obama’s executive order allowing 4 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the US They filed their request with US District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, asking him to refuse the call by half of the US states to delay implementation of the program until their court challenge is decided.
Hanen may prove a tough sell. The judge, whose courthouse is located on the Mexican border in Brownsville, accused the Department of Homeland Security last year of complicity in cross-border child smuggling.
“The DHS should enforce the laws of the United States — not break them,” Hanen said in a written opinion.
Hanen, who was appointed by Republican George W. Bush in 2002, rebuked the agency for “completing the criminal conspiracy” by delivering undocumented children caught at the border to their parents living illegally in the US The judge complained in a December 2013 opinion that the undocumented parents weren’t arrested or deported after being reunited with their kids, and taxpayers were footing the transit bills.
The biggest beneficiaries of the conspiracy, Hanen said, are the Mexican drug cartels that control the border smuggling rings, who’ve learned to rely on the US government to “finish the job of the human traffickers” if they get caught.
“Instead of enforcing the law of the United States, the government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it,” Hanen wrote in his opinion that followed a string of child-trafficking convictions in his court. “A private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted for this conduct.”
The Obama administration urged Hanen Wednesday to deny the states’ attempt to prevent the new immigration policy from taking effect, arguing that the federal government has broad discretionary authority under the US Constitution to “prioritise enforcement resources” however the president sees fit.
“At its core, plaintiffs’ suit is a generalized disagreement about the scope of the prosecutorial discretion of the executive branch of the federal government, in the exercise of exclusive federal authority over immigration,” government lawyers said in a filing in the Brownsville court.
That authority, under prior rulings of the Supreme Court, includes the right to “decide whether it makes sense to pursue removal at all, including because of immediate human concerns,” White Houe lawyers said.
Immigration officials must focus their limited resources on deporting criminals and recent border-crossers, because Congress singled these groups out for priority handling without providing sufficient funding to accomplish the job, the White House said in the filing.
By shifting away from “low-priority aliens,” DHS can spend more on rounding up dangerous immigrants and those without family ties to the US, they said.
The Obama administration told Hanen it believes judges don’t have authority to decide if the president abused his power by changing immigration laws singlehandedly, without Congressional approval.
Under a 1985 Supreme Court ruling, “an agency’s decision not to exercise its enforcement authority, or to exercise it in a particular way, is presumed to be immune from judicial review,” White House lawyers said in court papers.
A federal judge in Washington Tuesday threw out an Arizona sheriff’s challenge to the immigration policy change, ruling that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix didn’t have legal grounds to question the Obama administration’s decisions. White House lawyers urged Hanen to do the same with the multi-state challenge.
Last week, after US District Judge Arthur J. Schwab in Pittsburgh called Obama’s order unconstitutional, saying it “goes beyond prosecutorial discretion,” the Justice Department issued a rare public rebuke of the judiciary, saying Schwab is “flatly wrong.”
Hanen, in the middle of his 10-page opinion last year, said he “takes no position on the topic of immigration reform” and his opinion shouldn’t be read as a commentary on a “matter of much political debate.” He went on to assail Department of Homeland Security policies, alternately calling them “dangerous” and “failing.”
Texas, which is leading the multistate challenge to Obama’s immigration policy, chose to file its case in the state’s southernmost tip. Brownsville has a front-row seat at the “humanitarian crisis” that has swept more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants a day — many of them unaccompanied children — across Texas’s border in the past year, according to the complaint.
Brownsville has just two federal judges — Hanen and an appointee of Democratic ex-President Bill Clinton — and they evenly split all incoming civil cases, according to the court’s website and a courthouse clerk who confirmed the case-assignment protocol but declined to give her name.
“The assignments are random” between Hanen and the other judge, Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, said in an emailed response to questions on how Texas decided where to file the case.
Bean had no comment on Wednesday’s filing.WP-BLOOMBERG
