Obama’s Executive Actions on Immigration Are Ruled Unconstitutional

November 10, 2015

Matt Ford writes in The Atlantic:

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a series of President Obama’s executive orders on immigration on Friday, frustrating the administration’s efforts to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and setting up a potential showdown at the U.S. Supreme Court.

A three-judge panel ruled against the Obama administration on a 2-1 vote in Texas v. United States, upholding a lower court’s injunction against two programs. Obama created one of the programs, called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, or DAPA, and expanded another, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA in a unilateral effort to reshape the U.S. immigration system after the 2014 midterm elections. Texas and 26 other states sued the United States soon thereafter, in an attempt to halt the executive actions.

Since the Constitution grants exclusive power over immigration law to the federal government, the states’ lawsuit might seem quixotic. To circumvent this, Texas and the other states contend that by granting deferred action to an estimated five million undocumented immigrants, the Obama administration’s executive actions force the states to either provide services to them or change their state laws to avoid doing so. Texas, the only state whose standing was explicitly recognized by the court, specifically argued that the immigrants’ “lawful presence” would require the state to provide them with “state-subsidized driver’s licenses”and unemployment insurance.

The Obama administration argues that the changes are well within the executive branch’s discretionary power to enforce existing immigration law. But conservative opponents counter that the executive actions are an unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s power to write American laws. President Obama announced his policy change last November after considerable pressure from immigration-reform activists and Dreamers and in response to the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.

In their decision, two judges sided with the states and the lower court in Texas, citing both the impact on Texas and the breadth of the Obama administration’s changes as reasons to uphold the injunction. “At its core, this case is about the Secretary’s decision to change the immigration classification of millions of illegal aliens on a class-wide basis,” wrote Judge Jerry Smith in his majority opinion.

The administration’s interpretation of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, Smith wrote, would effectively vest the Secretary of Homeland Security with the power “to grant lawful presence and work authorization to any illegal alien in the United States—an untenable position in light of the INA’s intricate system of immigration classifications and employment eligibility.” In other words, Smith wrote, “the INA flatly does not permit the reclassification of millions of illegal aliens as lawfully present and thereby make them newly eligible for a host of federal and state benefits, including work authorization.”