The Obama Justice Department, in an “emergency motion” filed on Thursday, asked a federal appeals court to suspend the temporary injunction blocking Obama’s amnesty scheme. In a stunning display of lawyerly chutzpah, the DOJ attorneys claim the district court injunction, imposed last month by a U.S. District Court in Texas at the behest of 26 states, “offends basic separation-of-powers and federalism principles and impinges on core Executive functions” and is “interfering with immigration enforcement.”
Opponents of Obama’s amnesty edicts have also relied on the separation of powers doctrine, noting that the Constitution does not allow the president to make immigration law. Obama himself, in the years before his November 2014 announcement of his amnesty plan, said on multiple occasions that he did not have the power to stop deporting illegals.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has argued that Obama’s executive actions would “eliminate our current immigration laws and replace them with his own executive amnesty.” He has explained that Obama’s edicts were contrary to the laws passed by Congress, because Obama wants to give illegal aliens “work permits, photo IDs, access to trillions in Medicare and Social Security benefits over time, up to $35,000 in free cash tax credits, and the ability to take any job in America.”
As to “immigration enforcement,” in 2011 the Obama administration announced it would no longer deport illegal aliens from the U.S. interior unless they were criminals or national security threats.
Posted 3/14/15 by Margaret Hull