Signature Element Of
Legacy Thwarted
[But the successful legal assault on Mr. Obama’s
actions may also yield some political benefits for Mrs. Clinton and Democrats
by helping to motivate and energize Hispanic voters who are angry with the
court’s decision. Activists have promised to punish Donald J. Trump and other
Republicans who opposed the president’s actions by registering more Hispanic
voters and getting them to vote. Mr. Trump’s rhetorical assault on immigrants,
especially Mexicans, is also likely to help energize Hispanic activists on
behalf of Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic candidates.]
By Michael D. Shear
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President Obama speaking about the Supreme Court’s
decisions on Thursday.
Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times
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WASHINGTON — The
assertion of presidential power was remarkable in scale. With the flick of a
pen just before Thanksgiving in 2014, President Obama ordered that nearly five
million illegal immigrants be allowed to “come out of the shadows” and work
legally in the United States.
Standing at the same
lectern where he had announced the death of Osama bin Laden three years
earlier, Mr. Obama insisted in a speech to the nation that his plan for
immigrants was a fully legal response to a Republican-controlled Congress that
had refused his plea for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.
But on Thursday, the
Supreme Court disagreed. In a 4-to-4 decision, the justices let stand a lower
court ruling that Mr. Obama had overstepped his authority. The decision freezes
the president’s actions for the balance of his term, leaving the future of the
program — and millions of undocumented workers — in limbo.
Mr. Obama campaigned
vowing to win passage of comprehensive immigration legislation in his first
year in office, but the Supreme Court defeat will force him to finish his term
without securing the major progress he had promised to millions of Latino
immigrants living under the threat of deportation.
Instead, one of the
president’s chief immigration legacies will be the years of increased enforcement
he ordered at the border with Mexico and in immigrant communities, hoping it
would lead to a compromise with Republicans. The aggressive actions of
immigration agents and local law enforcement, especially during Mr. Obama’s
first term, angered many family members separated by raids and deportations.
Mr. Obama did earn praise
from Hispanics for taking action in 2012 to help the so-called Dreamers, young
undocumented immigrants who had been brought to the United States as small
children. Under the president’s program, more than 730,000 of them received
documents allowing them to work legally without constant fear that they might
be sent home.
Hillary Clinton, who
embraced the president’s executive action programs, has said she would expand
them. The court’s actions could complicate her ability to do that if she is
elected president in the fall.
But the successful legal
assault on Mr. Obama’s actions may also yield some political benefits for Mrs.
Clinton and Democrats by helping to motivate and energize Hispanic voters who
are angry with the court’s decision. Activists have promised to punish Donald
J. Trump and other Republicans who opposed the president’s actions by
registering more Hispanic voters and getting them to vote. Mr. Trump’s
rhetorical assault on immigrants, especially Mexicans, is also likely to help
energize Hispanic activists on behalf of Mrs. Clinton and other Democratic
candidates.
The court’s action comes
after nearly eight years of largely futile attempts by the president to make good
on his promise.
Mr. Obama’s 2014
executive actions came after years of fighting to get Congress to act. In 2013,
the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration overhaul that the White House said
the president could support. But House Republicans blocked any consideration of
the legislation, accusing the Senate and Mr. Obama of supporting amnesty for
the millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States.
For most of his
presidency, even Mr. Obama said he did not have the power to act unilaterally.
He repeatedly told Hispanic activists that he could not use the “Dreamers”
program as a model to expand similar protections to a much larger pool of
illegal immigrants.
“If we start broadening
that, then essentially I’ll be ignoring the law in a way that I think would be
very difficult to defend legally,” Mr. Obama told Jose Diaz-Balart in an
interview in September 2013, after it was clear that House Republicans were
blocking the Senate’s immigration measure. “So that’s not an option.”
Responding a month later
to hecklers urging him to take action, Mr. Obama snapped back, “The easy way
out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our
laws.”
But the pressure from
Hispanic activists only grew more intense. (The head of the nation’s largest
Latino advocacy organization once called Mr. Obama the “deporter in chief.”) By
the summer of 2014, the president had ordered Jeh Johnson, the secretary of
homeland security, to lead a team of lawyers in reassessing how much power Mr.
Obama had to act.
In remarks at the White
House on Nov. 20, 2014, the president made it clear that he had reversed
himself.
“The actions I’m taking
are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single
Republican president and every single Democratic president for the past
half-century,” Mr. Obama said. He added, “There are actions I have the legal
authority to take as president, the same kinds of actions taken by Democratic
and Republican presidents before me, that will help make our immigration system
more fair and more just.”
White House officials at
the time told reporters that they thought the legal case was rock-solid. In a
briefing the day that Mr. Obama made his announcement, administration officials
dismissed talk of a legal challenge by Republicans, arguing that Texas did not
have standing to sue.
As it turned out, that
proved too optimistic. A judge in Texas and a federal appeals court in New
Orleans agreed that the Texas and 25 other states had standing to sue the
government because the president’s actions could potentially be very expensive
for those states.
The Supreme Court, in its
ruling, deadlocked on the case, leaving intact — at least for now — the
victories by the states in the lower courts.