Federal judges in California suspended the deportation of seven illegal immigrants in five different cases, telling the prosecution to find out if the illegal immigrants might qualify to stay in the country based on President Obama’s new policy of deprioritizing some deportation cases in favor of others.
“I was surprised. I had not seen an order like that before,” said Bernadette Connolly, an attorney representing one of the illegal immigrants in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, according to Reuters. “She did not request the order and had not even asked the government to review Aranda Rodriguez’s case under the government’s new policy,” Reuters noted.
Last year, Obama’s director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, unveiled a policy of deprioritizing deportations in cases involving illegal immigrants who have no criminal record, other than their illegal immigration. “Monday’s five cases all involved individuals or couples who have been ordered deported but appear to fit Morton’s criteria for leniency,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Ninth Circuit’s decision has been denounced as an unconstitutional exercise of judidicial authority, even by the one dissenting judge in the immigration cases. “We have only the slimmest authority even to review the exercise of prosecutorial discretion; we certainly lack authority to demand a preemptive peek into whether and when (and no doubt, before long, why) the executive branch will exercise such discretion,” said dissenting Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain. “The majority thus needlessly catapults this court into a realm of decision-making from which it is constitutionally walled off,” he also argued.
The court orders have exposed President Obama to Republican criticism, as well. “The Ninth Circuit has a history of legislating from the bench and now they have turned the Obama administration’s prosecutorial discretion guidelines into an excuse for their judicial activism,” House Judiciary Committee chair Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said in a statement. “The Executive Branch has the sole power to determine whether or not to prosecute a case and the Ninth Circuit has jumped into an area where they do not have constitutional authority . . . The Ninth Circuit should decide cases under our nation’s laws, not under the Obama administration’s policies that ignore the law and intent of Congress.”
