A Texas federal judge has temporarily suspended Obama’s executive action on immigration so that a coalition of 26 states can pursue legal action against the order:
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen wrote in an opinion late Monday that no law gave the Obama administration the authority “to give 4.3 million removable aliens what the Department of Homeland Security itself labels as ‘legal presence.’”
“The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle,” he added, calling Obama’s immigration plan a “virtually irreversible” action.
Of course, the White House quickly said it would appeal the ruling:
“The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that the federal government can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws, which is exactly what the president did when he announced commonsense policies to help fix our broken immigration system,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest. “Those policies are consistent with the laws passed by Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as five decades of precedent by presidents of both parties who have used their authority to set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws.”
Judge Hanen made his ruling just hours after Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) released a lengthy timeline documenting every single time the Obama administration ignored, rewrote, delayed, or broke the nation’s standing immigration laws. The timeline begins in Jan. 2009 and ends — 50 pages later — on Feb. 13, 2015.
