History > 2016 > USA > Immigration (I)

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The Supreme Court, the Nativists and Immigrants

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD        NYT        JAN. 19, 2016

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/opinion/the-supreme-court-the-nativists-and-immigrants.html

Low-Priority Immigrants

Still Swept Up in Net of Deportation

 

JUNE 24, 2016

The New York Times

By JULIA PRESTON

WASHINGTON — Three agents knocked on the door of a modest duplex in a Wisconsin town just after dawn. The Mexican immigrant living on the ground floor stuck his head out.

They asked his name and he gave it. Within minutes José Cervantes Amaral was in handcuffs as his wife, also from Mexico, silently watched. After 18 years working and living quietly in the United States, Mr. Cervantes, who did not have legal papers, rode away in the back seat, heading for deportation.

It is a routine that continues daily. The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended initiatives by President Obama that would have given protection from deportation to more than four million immigrants in the country illegally, most of them parents of American citizens. Mr. Obama showed his frustration with the decision, saying his goal was to help immigrants who had raised families here and helped the country with their work. The president said immigrants who might have qualified for the programs would still be safe from deportation.

Still, deportations continue, thousands every week.

In November 2014 when Mr. Obama first announced the protection programs, he also set new priorities for enforcement. Since then, immigration authorities say, their focus is on removing convicted criminals and foreigners who pose national security threats. But the administration’s priorities also include deporting migrants from Central America, including children, who came in an influx since 2014. And immigrants who committed minor offenses — or none at all — are often swept up in the operations.

After Thursday’s Supreme Court decision, the president’s protections are gone, but the enforcement plan remains in effect. It is part of a particularly edgy moment for immigrants and their supporters framed by the Supreme Court ruling, Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign and Britain’s surprise vote, influenced in part by anti-immigrant sentiments, to leave the European Union.

Last year, immigration authorities deported 235,413 people, according to official figures. Of those, 59 percent were convicted criminals, and 98 percent fit within the administration’s priorities, Department of Homeland Security officials said. The top priority includes foreigners who pose a threat to national or border security or to public safety. Other priorities are for people with serious criminal records, but they also include any migrant caught entering the country illegally after Jan. 1, 2014.

Homeland Security officials said Friday that the Supreme Court decision would have no effect on the pace or strategy of enforcement.

“Our limited enforcement resources will not be focused on the removal of those who have committed no serious crimes, have been in this country for years and have families here,” said Marsha Catron, a spokeswoman for the department. “Under this policy, these people are not priorities for removal, nor should they be.”

Mr. Obama has carried out many more deportations than previous presidents, setting a record of more than 2.4 million formal removals.

But Republican lawmakers point to a sharp decrease in deportations — down 43 percent in 2015 from 409,849 in 2012 — to say that Mr. Obama has all but stopped enforcing immigration law. “When will the Obama administration end its reckless policies that wreak havoc on our communities?” asked Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

But what is not enough enforcement for some is too much for others. This week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is known as ICE, said it had arrested 331 immigrants in May and June in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri. The operations were its “latest effort to arrest and remove convicted criminal aliens,” said Ricardo Wong, the director of the agency’s office in Chicago.

“By focusing our resources on the most egregious offenders,” Mr. Wong said, “we ensure the very best use of our resources while immediately improving public safety.”

One of those arrested was Mr. Cervantes.

In 2006, Mr. Cervantes said in an interview by telephone on Friday, he was caught up in an immigration raid at a factory near his workplace. Local police who assisted in the raid arrested him, finding — mistakenly, he says — that he was working with documents under a false name.

Mr. Cervantes, a construction worker, pleaded guilty to a minor identity theft offense. A decade later, after he and his wife raised two daughters in Genoa City, Wis., immigration agents came to his door to deport him.

“The shock for my wife was very strong,” Mr. Cervantes said. She has been in treatment at local hospitals for kidney cancer, he said. “If we have to go back to Mexico, I won’t have her for long.”

He has been released while he fights his immigration case.

“The administration is continuing to deport people who should not be a priority,” said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, an organization that assisted Mr. Cervantes. Mr. Obama, she said, “can do much more to prevent the unnecessary breakup of families.”

Some clearly are in the priority group. On Friday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it had arrested 45 foreigners who had been listed by Interpol as wanted for serious crimes, including three men from El Salvador sought in connection with gang killings. Immigration agents have conducted many roundups of drug traffickers and human smugglers.

At the same time, a 19-year-old migrant from Honduras, Wildin Acosta, was still being held in an immigration detention center in Lumpkin, Ga., five months after he was arrested when he was heading to high school in Durham, N.C.

In 2014, Mr. Acosta crossed the border illegally and turned himself in to border agents, asking for asylum. Since he was 17 at the time and traveling without his parents, he was held under special protections for unaccompanied minors. He was sent to live with his parents, who had settled years before in Durham.

He started going to high school, made friends who helped him learn English and joined a local soccer league. He presented a formal request for asylum in the United States, saying in legal papers that he fled Honduras after two close relatives were murdered.

But he missed a date in immigration court and a judge ordered him deported. Mr. Acosta also turned 19, making him too old, immigration officials said, to be given deference as a minor.

Mr. Acosta was among dozens of teenagers as well as mothers and smaller children from Central America who were arrested in an operation by immigration agents over one weekend in late January. Homeland Security Department officials said that because of his recent border crossing, Mr. Acosta was among the highest priorities for deportation.

The arrests caused panic in immigrant communities in Durham. Teachers, lawmakers and community leaders mobilized to protest. Mr. Acosta’s lawyer, Evelyn Smallwood, has forestalled his deportation but has not secured his release.

“He is a good kid, and he is doing everything he can to keep his sanity,” she said. “The administration has said it is as important to remove Wildin as it is to remove a drug trafficker or a terrorist.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 25, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Low-Priority Immigrants, Still Swept Up in U.S. Deportation Net.

Low-Priority Immigrants Still Swept Up in Net of Deportation,
NYT, June 24, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/us/
low-priority-immigrants-still-swept-up-in-net-of-deportation.html

Supreme Court Tie

Blocks Obama Immigration Plan

 

JUNE 23, 2016

The New York Times

By ADAM LIPTAK

and MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it had deadlocked in a case challenging President Obama’s immigration plan, effectively ending what Mr. Obama had hoped would become one of his central legacies. The program would have shielded as many as five million undocumented immigrants from deportation and allowed them to legally work in the United States.

The 4-4 tie, which left in place an appeals court ruling blocking the plan, amplified the contentious election-year debate over the nation’s immigration policy and presidential power.

When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case in January, it seemed poised to issue a major ruling on presidential power. That did not materialize, but the court’s action, which established no precedent and included no reasoning, was nonetheless perhaps its most important statement this term.

The decision was just nine words long: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court.”

But its consequences will be vast, said Walter Dellinger, who was acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration. “Seldom have the hopes of so many been crushed by so few words,” he said.

Speaking at the White House, Mr. Obama described the ruling as a deep disappointment for immigrants who would not be able to emerge from the threat of deportation for at least the balance of his term.

“Today’s decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system,” he said before heading to the West Coast for a two-day trip. “It is heartbreaking for the millions of immigrants who have made their lives here.”

The decision was one of two determined by tie votes Thursday — the other concerned Indian tribal courts — and one of four so far this term. The court is scheduled to issue its final three decisions of the term, including one on a restrictive Texas abortion law, on Monday.

Mr. Obama said the court’s immigration ruling was a stark reminder of the consequences of Republicans’ refusal to consider Judge Merrick B. Garland, the president’s nominee to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.

“If you keep on blocking judges from getting on the bench, then courts can’t issue decisions,” Mr. Obama said. “And what that means is then you are going to have the status quo frozen, and we are not able to make progress on some very important issues.”

The case, United States v. Texas, No. 15-674, concerned a 2014 executive action by the president to allow as many as five million unauthorized immigrants who were the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program that would spare them from deportation and provide them with work permits. The program was called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA.

Mr. Obama has said he took the action after years of frustration with Republicans in Congress who had repeatedly refused to support bipartisan Senate legislation to update immigration laws. A coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, promptly challenged the plan, accusing the president of ignoring administrative procedures for changing rules and of abusing the power of his office by circumventing Congress.

“Today’s decision keeps in place what we have maintained from the very start: One person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law,” Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, said in a statement after the ruling. “This is a major setback to President Obama’s attempts to expand executive power, and a victory for those who believe in the separation of powers and the rule of law.”

The court did not disclose how the justices had voted, but they were almost certainly split along ideological lines. Administration officials had hoped that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. would join the court’s four-member liberal wing to save the program.

The case hinged in part on whether Texas had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave it standing to sue. Texas said it had standing because it would be costly for the state to give driver’s licenses to immigrants affected by the federal policy.

Chief Justice Roberts is often skeptical of expansive standing arguments. But it seemed plain when the case was argued in April that he was satisfied that Texas had standing, paving the way for a deadlock.

Mr. Obama said the White House did not believe the terse ruling from the court had any effect on the president’s authority to act unilaterally. But he said the practical effect would be to freeze his efforts on behalf of immigrants until after the November election.

He also predicted that lawmakers would eventually act to overhaul the nation’s immigration system.

“Congress is not going to be able to ignore America forever,” he said. “It’s not a matter of if; it’s a matter of when. We get these spasms of politics around immigration and fear-mongering, and then our traditions and our history and our better impulses kick in.”

White House officials had repeatedly argued that presidents in both parties had used similar executive authority in applying the nation’s immigration laws. And they said Congress had granted federal law enforcement wide discretion over how those laws should be carried out.

But the court’s ruling may mean that the next president will again need to seek a congressional compromise to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws. And it left immigration activists deeply disappointed.

“This is personal,” Rocio Saenz, the executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said in a statement. “We will remain at the front lines, committed to defending the immigration initiatives and paving the path to lasting immigration reform.”

The lower court rulings in the case were provisional, and the litigation will now continue and may again reach the Supreme Court when it is back at full strength. In the meantime, it seems unlikely that the program will be revived.

In February 2015, Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, Tex., entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program while the legal case proceeded. The government appealed, and a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans affirmed the injunction.

In their Supreme Court briefs, the states acknowledged that the president had wide authority over immigration matters, telling the justices that “the executive does have enforcement discretion to forbear from removing aliens on an individual basis.” Their quarrel, they said, was with what they called a blanket grant of “lawful presence” to millions of immigrants, entitling them to various benefits.

In response, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices that this “lawful presence” was merely what had always followed from the executive branch’s decision not to deport someone for a given period of time.

“Deferred action does not provide these individuals with any lawful status under the immigration laws,” he said. “But it provides some measure of dignity and decent treatment.”

“It recognizes the damage that would be wreaked by tearing apart families,” Mr. Verrilli added, “and it allows individuals to leave the shadow economy and work on the books to provide for their families, thereby reducing exploitation and distortion in our labor markets.”

The states said they had suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave them standing to sue.

Judge Jerry E. Smith, writing for the majority in the appeals court, focused on an injury said to have been suffered by Texas, which he said would have to spend millions of dollars to provide driver’s licenses to immigrants as a consequence of the federal program.

Mr. Verrilli told the justices that Texas’ injury was self-inflicted, a product of its decision to offer driver’s licenses for less than they cost to produce and to tie eligibility for them to federal standards.

Texas responded that being required to change its laws was itself the sort of harm that conferred standing. “Such a forced change in Texas law would impair Texas’ sovereign interest in ‘the power to create and enforce a legal code,’” the state’s lawyers wrote in a brief.

Judge Hanen grounded his injunction on the Obama administration’s failure to give notice and seek public comments on its new program. He found that notice and comment were required because the program gave blanket relief to entire categories of people, notwithstanding the administration’s assertion that it required case-by-case determinations about who was eligible for the program.

The appeals court affirmed that ruling and added a broader one. The program, it said, also exceeded Mr. Obama’s statutory authority.

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Follow Adam Liptak on Twitter @adamliptak.

A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2016,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Split Court Stifles Obama on Immigration.

Supreme Court Tie Blocks Obama Immigration Plan,
NYT, June 23, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/24/us/
supreme-court-immigration-obama-dapa.html

Pope Francis at the Border

FEB. 17, 2016

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages

Editorial

Pope Francis’ trip to Mexico ended on Wednesday in Ciudad Juárez, a city once made hellish by drug violence and still gripped by poverty and crime. He did not seem afraid, and brought with him only smiles and hugs, and words of solace and encouragement.

He visited a prison, greeting inmates one by one, urging them to live as “prophets,” to turn their suffering toward goodness. “Work,” he said, “so that this society which uses people and discards them will not go on claiming victims.”

He prayed at the border for the migrant dead, and condemned the “grave injustices” done to those who are forced by poverty and violence to journey north.

If only that message of decency, of human worth, could have been amplified, in English, to the United States, across the river to Texas, and beyond to Washington.

The pope celebrated Mass in the afternoon in an old fairgrounds beside the Rio Grande. In front of him were thousands of residents of Juárez and its American neighbor El Paso, and pilgrims who had traveled many miles to worship with him.

Beyond them, across the river, was a nation that has frightened itself to the point of panic about foreigners, with help from Republicans running for president.

It’s not just Donald Trump, or Ted Cruz, or the rest who would expel immigrants by the millions and deny safety to refugees fleeing war in Syria. So deep is the Republican fear that a once-feasible campaign for immigration reform now lies damaged beyond hope and recognition. Even Gov. John Kasich, the candidate of restraint and civility, who rejects mass deportation, said in last week’s debate that unauthorized immigrants must never be given a path to citizenship.

“I think he doesn’t understand the problems our country has,” Mr. Trump said of the pope last week, showing a depth of ignorance that is his trademark. “I don’t think he understands the danger of the open border that we have with Mexico.”

Pope Francis understands these problems and dangers, and so do those who went to see him, many of whose loved ones are dead, memorialized with crosses in and around Juárez, or in the desert borderlands. They know those who have left their homes, who have crossed a barren desert to provide for their families, or have done so themselves.

It takes courage to live in Juárez, to face up to dangers there, or to leave it and cross north to new lives. It takes no courage at all to demonize immigrants from the safety of the United States, and to stoke fear, for the sake of votes and power.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on February 18, 2016, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Pope Francis at the Border.

Pope Francis at the Border,
NYT, FEB.17, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/
opinion/pope-francis-at-the-border.html

The Supreme Court,

the Nativists and Immigrants

JAN. 19, 2016

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

As soon as 26 states took it upon themselves to sue President Obama over the sensible, humane executive actions he took in late 2014 to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, it was inevitable that the lawsuit would land on the Supreme Court’s doorstep.

On Tuesday morning, the justices announced that they would hear the case, which means a decision will most likely come down by the end of June. The states should never have been allowed standing to sue in the first place, and their substantive claims are groundless.

There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. No one, besides Donald Trump, believes the nation has the resources, or the will, to deport them all. The clearest solution is to focus on removing those who pose an actual threat to public safety while deferring action on most of the rest and helping them “come out of the shadows.” In 2012, the Obama administration allowed young immigrants who were brought here as children to be given work permits and be exempted from deportation, a program that has worked well. In November 2014, the president announced a plan to offer work permits and a three-year reprieve from deportation to as many as five million undocumented parents of American citizens or permanent residents, provided they had no criminal record and had lived in the country at least five years.

Getting hardworking people who have deep roots in their communities out of the shadows isn’t a new issue. In a 1980 presidential debate, George Bush decried the harsh efforts to marginalize undocumented immigrants. “We’re creating a whole society of really honorable, decent, family-loving people that are in violation of the law,” he said. Mr. Obama, along with other reality-based politicians on both the left and the right, understands this, but congressional Republicans have refused to pass any meaningful immigration reform.

Mr. Obama’s pragmatic deportation exemption programs are well within his legal and constitutional authority. The Supreme Court explicitly stated in 2012 that the federal government had “broad, undoubted power over the subject of immigration and the status of aliens” under the Constitution.

But Texas and other states — mostly conservative ones along the southern border — immediately cried foul, and steered a lawsuit to Judge Andrew Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville, Tex. Last February, Judge Hanen ruled in the states’ favor and blocked the president’s action. In November, a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit voted 2 to 1 to affirm that ruling.

In their brief to the Supreme Court, the states concede that the president has discretion to enforce immigration laws in individual cases. But they argue he does not have power to alter the legal status of entire classes of people.

This mischaracterizes the president’s actions. Presidents of both parties have long used their authority to enforce immigration laws selectively, so as to be “efficient, rational and humane,” as a group of former immigration and Homeland Security officials wrote in a brief to the court. For example, both the Reagan and first Bush administrations provided relief from deportation to spouses and children of those eligible for legalization — a class of people whom Congress had expressly declined to protect in the 1986 immigration reform law.

Apart from the fallacious argument on the president’s powers, the states have no standing to sue. Texas claims that it has that right simply because it thinks the president’s orders would harm its economy. If the court were to accept this kind of claim, it would mean that any time a state or city opposed a federal action, it could drag that political dispute into the courts.

As Judge Carolyn King noted in her dissent in the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, this argument “appears to allow limitless state intrusion into exclusively federal matters — effectively enabling the states, through the courts, to second-guess federal policy decisions.”

Congress should have passed comprehensive immigration reform years ago, rather than, say, threatening to impeach the president when he took on the issue. Mr. Obama is wholly within his authority to make wise use of limited enforcement resources. The Supreme Court has already recognized this fact; now it needs to reiterate it.

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A version of this editorial appears in print on January 20, 2016, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: The Justices and the Nativists.

The Supreme Court, the Nativists and Immigrants,
NYT, JAN. 19, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/20/
opinion/the-supreme-court-the-nativists-and-immigrants.html