By 4-4, justices defeat Obama plan on aliens

“Today’s decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system,” President Barack Obama said Thursday at the White House.
“Today’s decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system,” President Barack Obama said Thursday at the White House.

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court deadlocked Thursday on President Barack Obama's immigration plan that sought to shield millions of people living in the U.S. illegally from being deported, effectively killing the plan for the rest of his presidency.

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The 4-4 tie vote on United States v. Texas, No. 15-674, sets no national precedent but leaves in place the ruling by the federal appeals court in New Orleans. That lower court's ruling said Obama's administration lacked the authority to protect as many as 5 million illegal aliens from deportation and to make them eligible for work permits without approval from Congress.

The high court justices issued a one-sentence opinion, with no further comment. The court did not say how each justice voted.

Obama said Thursday's impasse "takes us further from the country we aspire to be."

"Today's decision is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system," the president told reporters 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."

A nine-justice court agreed to hear the case in January, but by the time of the arguments in late April, Justice Antonin Scalia had died. That left eight justices to decide the case.

People who would have benefited from Obama's plan -- called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents -- face no imminent threat of deportation because Congress has provided money to deal with only a small percentage of people who live in the country illegally, and the president retains ample discretion to decide whom to deport. But Obama's effort to expand deportation protection to many others is effectively stymied.

Obama said the White House does not believe that the ruling from the court has any effect on the president's authority to act unilaterally. But, he said, the practical effect will be to freeze his efforts on behalf of illegal aliens until after the November election.

"Now, we have got a choice about who we are going to be as a country and what we want to teach our kids," Obama said. A moment later, he added, "In November, Americans are going to have to make a decision about what we care about and who we are."

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton supported Obama's action and has said she will expand it. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has drawn a hard line on illegal immigration and would likely rescind it.

Obama stressed that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would not be affected by Thursday's Supreme Court development.

"It does not affect the existing Dreamers," he said, using the term for people brought to the United States as children and covered by the program.

He also said that "enforcement policies developed by my administration" are not affected, meaning that illegal aliens who have put down roots and have not committed crimes "will remain low priorities" for deportation.

"We will continue to implement existing programs that are already in place," Obama said, but the administration will not be able to expand those programs.

He said the remedies for the current impasse were for the Senate to consider Judge Merrick Garland, the president's nominee to the Supreme Court, and for congressional Republicans to join Democrats in passing comprehensive immigration policies.

He said the court's deadlock on the immigration case is proof that the Republican strategy is not "sustainable" over the long run.

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

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., welcomed the Supreme Court's nondecision, calling it "a win for Congress" and for the constitutional separation of powers.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of 26 states opposing Obama's plan, said: "Today's decision keeps in place what we have maintained from the very start: One person, even a president, cannot unilaterally change the law. 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."

History of the case

In November 2014, the Obama administration announced the programs -- protections for parents of children who are in the country legally and an expansion of the program that benefits people who were brought to this country as children.

Obama decided to move forward after Republicans won control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, and the chances for an immigration overhaul, already remote, were further diminished.

The Senate had passed a broad immigration bill with Democratic and Republican support in 2013, but the measure went nowhere in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

Texas quickly went to court to block the initiatives and was joined by other Republican-led states, including Arkansas. The states' lawsuit was heard by U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, Texas. Hanen, an appointee of President George W. Bush, previously had criticized the administration for lax immigration enforcement.

Hanen sided with the states, entering a preliminary injunction to block the program from taking effect.

Hanen based 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 government appealed, and a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans affirmed the injunction on a 2-1 vote. The program, it said, also exceeded Obama's statutory authority.

After the government appealed to the nation's highest court, 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 aliens, 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," 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. Smith, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, said Texas would have to spend millions of dollars to provide driver's licenses to aliens as a consequence of the federal program.

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.

Information for this article was contributed by Mark Sherman of The Associated Press; by Adam Liptak and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times; and by Robert Barnes and William Branigin of The Washington Post.

A Section on 06/24/2016

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