Tag Archives: immigration law

legal news, State news

Immigration seas are roiling yet again

The political water under the immigration issue keeps tossing and turning to the point that it’s making me queasy.

The latest wave to crash against the immigration vessel came from the Southern Federal Judicial District of Texas and U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who late Sunday said President Obama’s executive action delaying deportation of illegal immigrants violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the way federal regulations are set up and how much public input is delivered.

http://www.texastribune.org/2015/02/16/executive-action-immigration-ruling/

The Obama administration plans to appeal, most likely to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton hailed the judge’s ruling, saying it validates their contention that the feds reached beyond their grasp in delaying the deportation of illegal immigrants, about 1.46 million of whom live in Texas.

“President Obama abdicated his responsibility to uphold the United States Constitution when he attempted to circumvent the laws passed by Congress via executive fiat,” Abbott said in a statement, “and Judge Hanen’s decision rightly stops the President’s overreach in its tracks.”

Paxton agrees with the governor. “This decision is a victory for the rule of law in America and a crucial first step in reining in President Obama’s lawlessness,” he said in a statement. “This injunction makes it clear that the President is not a law unto himself, and must work with our elected leaders in Congress and satisfy the courts in a fashion our Founding Fathers envisioned.”

Did politics play a part in this federal judge’s decision? Judge Hanen was appointed by President George W. Bush and already is on record as suggesting the Department of Homeland Security was breaking immigration law by allowing undocumented immigrant children to be reunited with their parents rather than deporting or arresting them, according to the Texas Tribune.

Let’s wait, then, for progressives to bemoan the actions of an “unelected activist judge” who places himself above the law. I’m betting we won’t hear such an argument coming from that side of the aisle.

Something tells me the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to get this one.

In the meantime, pass the Dramamine.

 

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Border not secure? Tell the detainees

It’s difficult to imagine the terror that young people face when they’re shipped from their homes and they find themselves essentially trapped in a country that cannot accept them.

Then they learn that many people in this strange country have turned on them, believing that they are somehow responsible for the plight in which they find themselves.

Welcome to the United States of America, young Central American refugees.

I’ve become disheartened by this story as it has unfolded. The young people, thousands of them children barely past toddlerhood, have been allowed passage through Mexico and into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Reports are that they’re fleeing repression, virtual enslavement and corruption in their home countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

They come here unaccompanied, sent here by parents or transported by those notorious “coyotes,” who deal in human trafficking.

The president of the United States is asking Congress for some extra emergency money to help repatriate these young people – humanely, of course. He’s asking for money to help pay for more border security. Some in Congress don’t want to spend the money – even though they demand the president does something, anything, to help stem the flood of refugees.

Of all the arguments I’ve heard from Barack Obama’s critics, however, perhaps the most maddening in this notion that our borders are “porous,” that federal agents aren’t enforcing immigration laws, that the country has become a “magnet” for those who think it’s OK just to enter the United States and they’ll be given a safe place to live with no strings attached.

What on Earth are these critics thinking?

The borders cannot be sealed off. Still, we continue to capture illegal immigrants every single day. We’re deporting them in record numbers. The tens of thousands of young people being held by federal immigration authorities were captured, for crying out loud, by officers actually enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

I want this crisis to end as much as the next guy. I also want us to stop demonizing the children who are being used as pawns in this nasty struggle – and I want the critics to stop tossing out that demagogic canard that the United States is not enforcing its immigration laws.

Those helpless children would beg to differ.