Republicans Block Immigration of Millions- Again !




  by Michael D. Shear. New York Times. May 28, 2015

Administration officials had hoped to begin inviting millions of immigrants to sign up for the president’s new immigration program as early as this month

The State of Texas, led by Republicans,  last year filed a lawsuit against the president, accusing him of exceeding his authority and failing to follow the proper procedures for establishing new immigration rules. Twenty-five other states joined the lawsuit.

Immigration  efforts have  been shelved since February, when a Texas judge ordered a halt, calling it an executive overreach and agreeing that officials had violated administrative procedures.

On Tuesday, the appeals court refused to overturn that order, saying that it believed Mr. Obama’s lawyers would ultimately lose in their efforts to defend the president’s actions.

Rather than continue to fight the judge’s initial order, administration officials said Wednesday that government lawyers would wait and make what they believe will be a stronger legal argument on the merits of the president’s immigration program.

Those oral arguments before the Fifth Circuit are scheduled to begin during the week of July 6, and administration officials expressed confidence that they would eventually prevail.

If the president were to win at the appeals court later this summer, legal experts said it was possible that Mr. Obama could order the program to begin later this year.

But administration officials said it was very likely that whoever lost at the appeals court would ask the Supreme Court to consider the full merits of the president’s actions. If the court agrees to hear the case, it would likely hear arguments during its term that begins in October and could issue a ruling the following June.

That would mean that the legal fate of the president’s immigration program would be decided just as the fall campaign for the 2016 presidential contest gets into full swing.

If Mr. Obama were to emerge victorious in the court in the summer of 2016, the timing would pose several problems for his immigration programs.

With only a few months to go before he leaves office, Mr. Obama’s administration would face the daunting task of quickly setting up a new bureaucracy that could process millions of applications from undocumented immigrants. Officials said they believe the administration could do that in a few months, if necessary.

But even as they would be seeking to get the program up and running, the issue could become a major part of the debate between the two presidential candidates.

By then, a Republican candidate might be vowing to repeal the president’s executive actions even as a Democratic candidate promises to keep them in place. Several Republican hopefuls have already made such a promise and Hillary Rodham Clinton has said she would expand Mr. Obama’s executive actions if she was elected president.

That political debate could make undocumented immigrants very nervous about revealing themselves before they knew who the next president was going to be.

“That might not be something they want to do,” Mr. Legomsky said.
Read the full story: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/us/obama-immigration-executive-action-supreme-court.html

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