Obama administration asks Supreme Court to rule on immigration plan

But on Friday, the Justice Department filed an appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court, asking the justices to allow Obama’s executive actions to be implemented.

President Barack Obama is not letting his immigration executive actions be shut down without a fight and he plans to take it all the way to the Supreme Court. That program temporarily exempts people who arrived in the U.S.as children from deportation.

The activists plan to work during the next few months to register more Latino voters in the hope of influencing the presidential election of 2016. If the Court were to accept the appeal and if it were to hand down a decision in favor of the government before the end of next June, the Obama Administration would have a relatively short amount of time to implement the program before the president’s second term ends.

Nearly immediately, Texas and 25 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to stop it. In February, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, Texas, entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program. “The decision warrants immediate review”.

Mr. Obama insists he’s only expanding on the types of policies previous presidents have overseen – though his administration admits the size of his program is unprecedented.

Speakers also decried anti-immigrant rhetoric that has escalated since the Paris attacks, including a U.S. House vote Wednesday that could hold up resettlement of Syrian refugees.

“If the Supreme Court takes the case, I expect it will rebuff President Obama’s misreading of his powers under federal law and his refusal to execute the laws faithfully – his core constitutional responsibility”, said John Yoo, a professor of law at the University of California-Berkeley.

The administration makes three main arguments in its Supreme Court appeal: the states have no right to challenge the policy in federal court; the government followed appropriate procedure and the administration has broad discretion in the area of immigration.

While the centerpiece of the executive actions-expanded DACA and DAPA-remains tied up in litigation, the Administration can and should use its uncontested authority to continue refining enforcement priorities and improving the operations and functions of the visa system.

“Deferred action…is much more than nonenforcement: It would affirmatively confer “lawful presence” and associated benefits on a class of unlawfully present aliens”, he said.

Homeland Security chief Jeh Johnson said that law enforcement and customs agents now focus on convicted criminals, rather than hunt for people who came here to find work.

He also announced the expansion of a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that would shield young immigrants from deportation who do not have legal status but were brought here as children. If the justices don’t agree by mid-January to hear the case, the issue probably will not be decided until after Obama leaves office in January 2017.