When it takes up the question of whether President Obama's 2014 immigration executive actions were constitutional, the Supreme Court will throw out its typical playbook.
United States v. Texas is one of the most — if not the most — important cases before the highest court this term. It's certainly the most important immigration case the Supreme Court has taken up in a generation (or, arguably, a century). And the Court is treating it accordingly.
On Monday, instead of splitting up 60 minutes of oral arguments between the two sides of the case, as usually happens, the Court will convene for 90 minutes — and bring in more parties to argue their case.
Texas and the 25 other states suing will get 30 minutes. The federal government will get 35. But the Supreme Court has also given 10 minutes to a lawyer representing a group of immigrant women who'd benefit from Obama's executive actions. And that's not all — 15 minutes will go to the US House of Representatives (thanks to the Republican House majority), which has jumped in to support the states.
The unusually complicated oral argument process reflects just how messy this case is. It's a case covering surprisingly narrow-sounding legal questions, but its outcome carries broad implications for the relationship between Congress and the president, and the relationship between the federal government and the states. Oh, yeah — and it's a presidential election year, and both immigration and the Court itself have become election issues.
All this makes it something of a nightmare scenario for Chief Justice John Roberts, who tends to be more anxious than the typical Supreme Court justice to present the Court's opinions as drawn purely from law rather than politics.
As the justices hear oral arguments and consider the case before issuing an opinion (which they're expected to do in late June, at the end of the term), Roberts and the other justices will have to work through legal questions that are both less contentious and more abstract than the broader immigration debate makes them seem.
Then they'll have to figure out if there's any way they can cobble together a five-vote majority for a lasting opinion — or if the eight-person Court will deadlock, putting the most important case of the Court's term in limbo and creating the opportunity for chaos.
1) What's this case about?
In November 2014, President Obama issued a series of memos declaring executive actions on immigration. Two of those are at issue in this case.
One memo expanded the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which since 2012 had allowed immigrants who'd come to the US as children to apply for temporary protection from deportation and work permits.
The other one added a new deferred action program — the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program — which would have allowed millions of unauthorized immigrants who have US citizen or permanent resident children to apply for deportation protection and work permits as well.
The two 2014 actions are usually referred to as DAPA/DACA+. Since the states won in the lower courts, both of them have been put on hold since the first ruling was issued in February 2015. The original DACA program from 2012, however, is still in place and isn't being challenged in this suit. (To prevent confusion, I'll just refer to DAPA instead of DAPA/DACA+ when talking about the 2014 actions.)
2) Why did President Obama create this program in the first place?
Federal immigration enforcement has totally transformed over the past 20 years. More people are eligible for deportation than ever before. The growth of the unauthorized population pre–Great Recession meant there were more people to deport. After 9/11, the government got vastly more money and resources for deportation. And deportations escalated accordingly — from 183,000 in 1999 to a high of 400,000 during the first several years of the Obama administration.
President Obama has spent most of his time in office trying to impose some sort of control on all of this — to make sure the government is choosing who's most important to deport, rather than arbitrarily deporting anyone Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents get their hands on. His first attempts — setting high and low "priorities" for deportation and telling immigration agents to follow them — were something both sides in the current court case agree he could do but that rank-and-file immigration agents frequently ignored in favor of their own judgment.
Read more
http://www.vox.com/2016/4/15/11424614/supreme-court-immigration-dapa-daca
No comments:
Post a Comment