A Texas federal judge has temporarily blocked President Obama’s executive action on immigration, suspending the White House plan to spare up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation so a collection of 26 states can pursue a lawsuit to permanently halt the unilateral directive.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen wrote in an opinion late Monday that no law gave the Obama administration the authority “to give 4.3 million removable aliens what the Department of Homeland Security itself labels as ‘legal presence.’”
“The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle,” he added, calling Obama’s immigration plan a “virtually irreversible” action.
The White House early Tuesday ripped into the southern Texas judge’s decision and said the Department of Justice would soon file an appeal.
“The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that the federal government can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws, which is exactly what the president did when he announced commonsense policies to help fix our broken immigration system,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “Those policies are consistent with the laws passed by Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as five decades of precedent by presidents of both parties who have used their authority to set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws.”
Obama’s push to expand the deferral of deportations for young illegal immigrants, so called Dreamers, was set to begin on Wednesday. The more sweeping part of his executive action, granting deportation relief to parents of U.S. citizens and permanent residents, was more than two months from implementation.
The judge’s decision grants Republicans at least a temporary victory as they struggle to unite behind a plan to challenge the most sweeping change to the immigration system in decades. GOP lawmakers have been unable to get 60 votes in the Senate for a blueprint that would roll back Obama’s executive action on immigration.
At the same time, funding for the Department of Homeland Security is scheduled to run out in late February.
