Court battle over Obama immigration action could be road map for reform

Federal appeals judges on Friday peppered lawyers on both sides with questions in a fight over President Barack Obama’s move to shield millions of immigrants from deportation. A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel held a special hearing in a closely watched case that is holding up Obama’s immigration action. A coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, sued to block the plan. The hearing was on an appeal of a Texas judge’s injunction. The Justice Department argued that Texas has no legal standing in the matter. Texas’s solicitor general countered that granting legal status to immigrants will be costly for Texas.

If Texas is right, it could challenge an individual’s right to seek asylum. The states do not have standing in the downstream effects of a federal immigration policy.

Benjamin Mizer, the Justice Department’s principal deputy assistant attorney general

While many Latino voters believe that Republicans have stood in the way of comprehensive immigration reform, it is also true President Obama has, despite efforts to be more compassionate toward undocumented immigrants, overseen record numbers of deportations. But perhaps more significantly for an immigration reform movement stuck in the mud, testimony in New Orleans focused less on populist passions and more on the practical aspects of the president’s actions. Such a deeper look at the policy’s real-world impacts, border policy experts say, could force politicians to address the kind of substantive questions that could help push comprehensive immigration reform forward.

Because of those legitimate concerns [about the president’s executive action], one benefit of litigation like this is getting the relevant parties to the table to talk about these issues in order to work out a compromise on immigration reform.

Kevin Johnson, the dean of the University of California, Davis, law school

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