High court rejects Arizona sheriff’s appeal over immigration

The US Supreme Court has said it will consider a challenge to one of President Barack Obama’s key immigration reform plans.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in April and deliver its decision by late June, about a month before the Republican and Democratic parties gather for their nominating conventions.

Governors of 26 U.S. states – majority Republicans – challenged the orders as exceeding the president’s executive powers and federal courts in Texas and Louisiana put them on hold.

Unfreezing the presidential orders would allow “millions of immigrants to come out of the shadows and positively contribute to our economy, and to our communities”, he said. Most recently, in November, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the states, prompting the appeal to the Supreme Court.

Setting priorities about whom to deport is a practical response to the fact that Congress has given the administration only enough money to deport no more than about 400,000 of the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, the government contends. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has pledged to go further than Mr Obama to protect large groups of immigrants from deportation.

Texas took the leading role in the case. At issue is the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) program. Verrilli said Texas has cited no “injury” in its lawsuit, except the state’s cost of providing drivers’ licenses to immigrants.

The announcement sets the stage for what promises to be one of the most significant and politically charged immigration decisions in the court’s history, coming in the midst of the 2016 presidential race.

The White House has vowed to kickstart the programme if the court backs the plan, so migrants could began enrolling before a new president takes office in January 2017. The Court should affirm what President Obama said himself on more than 20 occasions: “that he can not unilaterally rewrite congressional laws and circumvent the people’s representatives”.

The executive actions would only allow DREAMers or immigrants who have children who are us citizens stay in the USA legally. The new plan would broaden that program and add protections for about 4.3 million adults with children who are USA citizens.

Given that, the government says, there are millions of “hard working people who have become integrated members of American society and who are extremely unlikely to be deported given limited enforcement resources”.

The program “would allow illegal aliens to receive the benefits of lawful presence exclusively on account of their children’s immigration status, without complying with any of the requirements… that Congress has deliberately imposed”, the court said.