Judge halts Obama’s executive action on immigration

President Barack Obama speaks in the White House briefing room in Washington Thursday on the Supreme Court decision on immigration. A tie vote by the Supreme Court is blocking the president's immigration plan that sought to shield millions living in the U.S. illegally from deportation, District of Columbia, June 23, 2016 | AP Photo/Andrew Harnik; St. George News

ST. GEORGE – One day before hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants were to begin applying for work permits and legal protection, Judge Andrew S. Hansen, of United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, issued an Order of Temporary Injunction Tuesday in the lawsuit joined by 25 states, including Utah, challenging President Obama’s unilateral executive action regarding immigration policy.

The judge said the administration’s programs would impose major burdens on states and strain state budgets, and that the administration had not followed required procedures for changing federal rules.

Attorney General Sean D. Reyes reminded citizens of Utah that the lawsuit is based on a constitutional challenge to the President bypassing Congress and exceeding his executive authority. Additionally, to the extent he had any rule making authority, the lawsuit addresses how President Obama failed to comply with statutory requirements, which bind his administration.

Reyes said in a press statement issued Tuesday:

The President exceeded his constitutional authority, plain and simple, and the states brought suit so their representatives in Congress could debate and pass much needed immigration reform. It is clear that the District Court understands that this multiple state action is not about immigration policy, but about the rule of law. We believe Judge Hanen is correct in granting the injunction due to failure of the Defendants to comply with the Administrative Procedure Act. Our purpose is not to frustrate debate and action on immigration issues. To the contrary, we are urging our congressional delegation to pass laws related to immigration.

Let me say this again. We did not join this lawsuit to address immigration policy. Whether you agree or disagree with some, all or none of the President’s proposal is not the point. The process of how President Obama overstepped his legal authority is what is being challenged. Regardless of how you feel about the policy, it does not justify implementation in an unconstitutional manner. We are encouraged that the courts are reviewing this action and that this temporary injunction has been ordered.

The Texas-led coalition of states in the legal challenge are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Related posts

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @STGnews

Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2015, all rights reserved.

Free News Delivery by Email

Would you like to have the day's news stories delivered right to your inbox every evening? Enter your email below to start!

15 Comments

  • BIG GUY February 18, 2015 at 5:19 am

    The ends don’t justify the (unconstitutional) means. Obama told a largely Hispanic audience last year, “Congress didn’t act so I changed the law.” That statement alone, from a supposed constitutional law professor no less, ought to give everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, the chills.

    Obama’s official justification argued in court was that the government lacked sufficient funds to enforce existing law. But that rationale ought to frighten both liberals and conservatives. Suppose our next president decides unilaterally that he or she doesn’t have sufficient funds to enforce environmental or anti-discrimination laws or any other law the new president happens not to like.

    The argument that previous Republican presidents used executive actions to limit immigration law enforcement fails on two counts. First, the actions affected only a small number of people for a limited time while they waited to become eligible for a duly passed law to take effect and neither Democrats or Republicans objected in light of the actions’ obvious fairness. Second, a prior executive action is never justification, in and of itself, for future executive actions, especially when those prior actions had no objectors from either party.

    Obama planned to offer Social Security cards, work permits and access to many Federal and state welfare programs in addition to ignoring immigration laws. These steps, while they are not the basis for the judge’s stay order, go far beyond any justification based on “insufficient funding to enforce the law.” Does he think these things are free?

    I personally support expanded immigration, but using unconstitutional means to achieve it (“I changed the law”) is exceptionally dangerous to our democracy.

    • Mesaizacd February 18, 2015 at 2:29 pm

      You know. If you’re going to accuse Obama of saying something try making sure you know exactly what was said and not what you think was said

      • BIG GUY February 18, 2015 at 4:05 pm

        And what he actually said was somehow different in any substantive way from what I stated above? Really?

  • KarenS February 18, 2015 at 9:49 am

    Actually, President Obama did not say “I changed the law”. What he said was in response to some hecklers at a speech in Chicago. His actual words were, “I just took an action to change the law.” Not the same thing, although all the right-wing websites proclaim that he said “I changed the law”.

    In addition, President Obama DID NOT offer “access to many Federal and state welfare programs.” Only SS numbers, work permits and the ability to travel would be given.

    The Senate passed a bi-partisan comprehensive immigration bill in 2013 by a vote of 68 to 32. It was sent to the House where John Boehner let it die because of the opposition of conservative Republicans. Congress failed to act, so Obama acted.

    • BIG GUY February 18, 2015 at 4:02 pm

      Are we supposed to think that “I just took an action to change the law” is somehow different in any substantive way from “I changed the law?” You’re living in a left wing dream world if you think so. What do you think Obama’s intended message was to his largely Hispanic audience?

      FYI, anyone with a Social Security card, a work permit and a driver’s license can apply for any of the multitude of benefits our government offers as listed above as well as Obamacare, Medicaid, etc. Were you asked for proof of citizenship the last time you applied for anything from the government? Obama hasn’t highlighted those facts for obvious reasons but they are all true.

      Gee, how awful for the leader of one of the two legislative branches of Congress to keep legislation from a vote because that vote would illustrate the splits in his party. I’m talking about Harry Reid and the literally dozens of House-passed bills over the last four years that he kept from Senate votes because a significant number of Democrat senators would vote for them, embarrassing the president. And then Reid and Obama had the chutzpah to blame Republicans for a “do nothing” Congress. Oh, did Boehner do that once? It takes nerve or blind partisanship on your part to bring that up given Reid’s record. Times have changed dramatically for the better with McConnell in charge: bills come to the floor and Democrats can debate them and offer amendments.

      By the way, as a candidate Obama said that a president does not have authority to change immigration law and during most of his first six years as president, he repeated that fact. He knows full well that what he now proposes to do is unconstitutional. Why did he do it? Pure “optics.” Even if he’s slapped down, he’s setting the stage for the 2016 election to allow Democrats to portray Republicans as anti-Hispanic. Obama, the constitutional law professor, has had more Supreme Court slap downs for unconstitutional actions, a number of them 9-0, than any president since Franklin Roosevelt.

  • David February 18, 2015 at 12:45 pm

    The Tea Party and true Conservatives has welcomed Judge Hanen’s decision because it slows and perhaps may even stop Obama’s unconstitutional executive illegal alien amnesty. But the judge’s decision, brought about by principled conservative Attorney’s General and Governors, is a desperate substitute that we welcome only because GOP establishment in Congress have failed to do the job the Framers of the Constitution predicted for them. Any block to Obama’s illegal alien Amnesty, gives all Americans a chance to speak up and stand with the Tea Party against this unconstitutional law. Just like Sen. Harry Reid’s deliberate refusal to allow any vote on just about any bill that received house approval, any legislation on the illegal alien amnesty has been held in stasis.

    While millions of our own people, citizens and legalized resident are seeking a decent job, fighting to survive and trying to feed their family this president illegally overshot his authority and opened the border wide, given access to criminals. Illegal aliens are criminals. People who overstay their visa and intentionally do not return home after it expires—they are criminals. Obama has split this great nation, with his radical Liberal elected official liars and corruption that has never seen the light of day before. His liberal Democratic backers are bleeding American dry of benefits and entitlements, grants meant for the people who have paid into the system. Not for illegal aliens fraudulently stealing child tax credits in the billions of dollars, or Obama’s IRS letting illegal aliens appropriate billions of more dollars in Earned Tax Credits through the theft of jobs.

    The America we live in today is not the America I once knew? Everywhere I look I see the corrosion of American principles, the loss of individual freedom, the irrational fervor of the medical establishment and the tyranny of American government that is even spying on us. Our freedoms have been slowly eroding away, as this administration no longer listens to the people and gains its acceptance by massive amounts of freebies to foreigners and to the deadbeats, who are a virus on the taxpayers.

    This is not the America I knew where surveillance efforts were focused on foreign enemies rather than domestic citizens, where a citizen is not threatened or intimidated by the ‘Politically Correct Police’ and free speech is becoming a thing of the past, where veterans were honored and prominent rather than condemned and medically neglected, that won World War II and beat back a tyrannical Nazi fascist government in the name of freedom and democracy. Today, the occupied American government has become the very same tyrannical fascist bully it once sought to defeat, where health insurance was affordable–and voluntary, where doctors could practice personalized, local medicine and weren’t beholden to a stifling government system of mindless diagnosis and medication prescribing.

    An America where television or radio news actually resembled the facts and wasn’t just a White House propaganda racket disguised as news, where launching a conservative non-profit to educate people about the Bible or the Bill of Rights did not get you cruelly targeted by the IRS with penalizing audits, America where newly sworn-in government representatives didn’t violate the Constitution the very next day after swearing allegiance to it, where members of Congress actually read legislation before passing it, where federal regulators used to limit the power of globalist corporations rather than conniving with them to develop their power over the People, where special interests have more influence over lawmakers than the people, where the US Attorney General wasn’t a gun-running criminal thug who tried to cause gun aggression in America in order to destroy the Second Amendment,

    Today we have an America where a masquerading ultra left Liberal President didn’t believe he was a dictator and didn’t use the overreach of his executive orders to dictate his illegal policies to the country bypassing Congress and implementing an illegal alien amnesty.

    Where is the America where being thought of as a patriot was a insignia of honor, not an accusation of being a domestic terrorist, where people used to trade hard work for honest pay instead of merely voting for whatever politician promises them the most entitlement handouts, where your vote actually counted, and where elections weren’t systematically rigged by electronic voting machines or where non-citizens are able to vote, as there is no need to show voter ID, where real truth-telling journalism was celebrated rather than condemned and awash with Marxist ideology, Most of all, I miss the America where good, honest, hard-working, truth-telling citizens didn’t have to live in constant fear of being accused, arrested, imprisoned, fined or terrorized by their own government.

    It is time for GOP hierarchy—not the Tea Party Republicans who fight against their own elitists puppets of mega corporations, big business and agriculture; to put an end to the destruction of American families that Obama’s cheap labor policy national impact or Obama’s call for voters, legal and unlawful. Get ready for battle. We need to march all over Washington. Plaster our messages all over the offices of our elected officials. Get in their faces. We urge you to call your Representative and Senators (the Capitol Switchboard is 1-866-220-0044) and demand that they vote to defund Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty and protect American jobs for American workers. Do not suppress the pressure in fact increase it on Washington as it your nation, your employment and the shrinkage of your pay check.

    So are you ready to help us stop this insanity that is costing taxpayers 538 billion dollars a year and end amnesty for illegal aliens once and for all—before the true and final destruction begins? You the American people, have ALL the power of your vote. If the Southern border stays open, with this President directives to overrun this country with foreign nationals the citizens will suffer dearly, including massive tax increases to financially support the 5 million already here and those waiting to escape their country of birth.

    Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama issues 50-page calendar of Obama’s overreaching executive actions on immigration. Read Senator Sessions’ entire dated list here: at http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2015/02/16/

    • Mesaizacd February 18, 2015 at 2:31 pm

      David.. BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH shorten the comments LOL this is a comment section not a section for windbags

      • mesaman February 18, 2015 at 5:11 pm

        Careful, Juan. The only difference between David and you is the duration of the blow. I would label you a gust of wind.

      • anybody home February 18, 2015 at 5:14 pm

        Yeah, David. Get your own website…Or stop copying whole pages of somebody else’s.

    • munchie February 18, 2015 at 6:46 pm

      Well David, maybe you should take the advice all the right-wing nuts give to us lefties and just leave

    • KarenS February 19, 2015 at 7:14 am

      “DAVID” is actually someone who calls himself David Frances who has “contributed” this same rant to many, many comment boards. In the future, STGNews should just google a phrase from a long-winded comment to discover the source and not publish it.

  • KarenS February 18, 2015 at 4:20 pm

    So, I take it that you are an anti-vaxxer?

  • fun bag February 18, 2015 at 6:55 pm

    as a liberal, i wish we could put all these illegals on a train and ship them home… or if not home, maybe pakistan or something…

  • ladybugavenger February 18, 2015 at 9:23 pm

    Ship the President back to kenya

    • Mesaizacd February 19, 2015 at 1:16 am

      This is a fantastic idea

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.