Pirate's Cove

On one hand, you have some judges supporting this unconstitutional and extra-legal program which was only supposed to be temporary but is really meant to give these illegals permanent standing. On the other, you have people who say “hey, we have laws”

(Texas Tribune) The state of Texas will continue to incur irreparable financial harm if an Obama-era immigration program isn’t halted immediately, attorneys for the state argued in Houston on Wednesday.

But lawyers representing nearly two dozen recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program countered by saying Texas sat back for six years and did nothing, and its attorneys have yet to prove the harm the state claims it has faced since the program was implemented in 2012.

Those were just two of the arguments presented to U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen on Wednesday after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Trump Administration in May to end the 2012 program, which protects immigrants brought into the U.S. as children from deportation and allows them to obtain a two-year work permit.

Hanen in 2015 halted a more far-reaching immigration program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, after he agreed with Texas and 25 other states that the initiative was too broad for the president to create on his own and that federal procedures were violated when it was implemented.

Assistant Texas Attorney General Todd Disher said Hanen’s prior decision should be applied to this current case because both programs were implemented by similar methods.

Regarding that prior decision

Hanen’s 2015 ruling, which was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court, was also cited as a reason that the 2012 program was a unilateral overreach of executive authority.

“The Fifth Circuit correctly held the [Immigration and Nationality Act] does not permit the reclassification of millions of illegal aliens.”

Essentially, what DACA did was offer “temporary” relief from being deported, yet, when does that end? The idea was that Congress would suddenly rush to legalize these “kids” who were “brought” here illegally. Yet, that did not happen. Because there are enough people in Congress who realize that coming illegally is against federal law and we should not be rewarding bad behavior that would entice others to come illegally. The DACA kids just expected to be given citizenship. They didn’t want to earn it, nor pay for it, as so many others do who go through the normal method.

Over at the USA Today, Texas AG Ken Paxton writes

“I am president, I am not king. I can’t do these things just by myself.”

“With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.”

Despite these statements, President Obama nevertheless proceeded with his notorious DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. DACA unilaterally granted legal status to a whole class of illegal aliens without congressional approval. It therefore represents a dangerous exercise of executive power, which, if left unchecked, allows the President to set aside any duly enacted law. On Wednesday, as the attorney general of Texas, my office argued DACA’s unconstitutionality to a federal court.

Back in June 2017, I wrote a letter to President Trump urging him to follow through on his campaign promise to rescind DACA. True to his word, the President promised to cancel DACA by March5, 2018 if Congress did not amend federal law. When Congress failed to act and the president rescinded the original executive action, federal judges blocked him, issuing the logically inconsistent holdings that President Trump cannot unilaterally undo an executive action his predecessor had unilaterally undertaken in the first place.

Read the rest.