The Justice Department said President Obama’s new executive action granting amnesty from deportation to illegal immigrant parents is legal because he limited it to those whose children could eventually petition for them to stay anyway.
Office of Legal Counsel lawyers, who serve as the government’s internal legal office, told the president he could not grant amnesty to parents of so-called Dreamers, because that would be going too far. But as long as he halted deportations and gave work permits to parents whose children have a permanent legal claim to be in the U.S., he was on safe ground.
The lawyers said Homeland Security can still refuse to deport Dreamers’ parents, but it cannot be done on a proactive blanket basis, as will happen with the parents of citizens.
“Extending deferred action to the parents of DACA recipients would therefore expand family-based immigration relief in a manner that deviates in important respects from the immigration system Congress has enacted and the policies that system embodies,” the lawyers concluded in their memo, dated Wednesday.
State and local officials have already said they’ll sue to try to stop Mr. Obama’s policy, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, filed his lawsuit almost immediately after the president finished speaking Thursday night.
But they’ll face several obstacles, including convincing courts that they been injured by the president’s moves and therefore have standing to sue. Sheriff Arpaio argued in his case that his operations of his sheriff’s office have been affected by the increase in illegal immigrants allowed to remain in the U.S.
In its legal memo, the Justice Department said Mr. Obama’s amnesty goes well beyond any previous example, which the lawyers said did raise a question in their minds. But they concluded that since the entire population could eventually have a pathway to citizenship because of their relationship with citizen or legal permanent resident children, it was acceptable to grant them categorical amnesty now.
Most important, given its limited resources, the Homeland Security Department already must pick and choose who it deports, and so it’s acceptable to carve out populations it places low on its priority list.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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