Our Southern Border Illegal Immigration Issue: Battle brewing
over this subject reported on from Vox.com with this headline:
“A
Trump judge seized control of ICE, and the Supreme Court will decide whether to
stop him”
Judge Drew Tipton’s order
in United States v. Texas is completely lawless. Thus far, the Supreme Court
has given him a pass.
In July, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas
effectively seized control of parts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the
federal agency that enforces immigration laws within US borders. Although Judge
Drew Tipton’s opinion in United States v. Texas contains a simply astonishing array of legal and
factual errors, the Supreme Court has thus far tolerated Tipton’s
overreach and permitted his order to remain in effect.
Nearly five months later, the Supreme Court will give
the Texas case a full hearing on Tuesday. And there’s a good
chance that even this Court, where Republican appointees control
two-thirds of the seats, will reverse Tipton’s decision — his opinion is that bad.
The
case involves a memo that
HSD Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued in September 2021.
That memo instructs ICE
agents to prioritize undocumented immigrants who “pose a threat to national
security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s
well-being when making arrests or otherwise enforcing immigration law.”
A federal statute
explicitly states that the homeland security secretary “shall be responsible
for establishing national
immigration enforcement policies & priorities,” – the department issued similar memos setting enforcement priorities in 2005 (GW Bush); 2010 (Obama); 2011 (Obama): and 2014 (Obama); and in 2017 (Trump).
Now the Republican AG’s in TX and LA have asked Judge Tipton
to invalidate Mayorkas’s memo which makes absolutely not legal sense.
Judge Tipton defied the statute permitting Mayorkas to set
enforcement priorities — and a whole host of other, well-established legal principles — and he declared
Mayorkas’s enforcement priorities invalid, and again a very poor reasoned
decision.
And, BTW: This is not the first time that Judge Tipton relied on highly dubious legal reasoning to sabotage the Biden
administration’s immigration policies.
In July, shortly after
Tipton handed down his decision, the DOJ asked the Supreme Court to halt
Tipton’s order while this case was still pending. The Court voted 5-4 to deny the request, even as Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted with
the three liberal justices.
That means that, even if
the Court does ultimately reject Tipton’s reasoning, his erroneous order will
have been in effect for months by the time the Supreme Court strikes it down. That
means Mayorkas will have been prevented from exercising his statutory authority
over ICE during that entire time, and as a threshold matter, it’s important to
understand why Mayorkas must have authority to set enforcement priorities for
ICE.
DOJ explained in a 2014 memo: “There are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country, but Congress has only appropriated enough resources to remove fewer than 400,000 each year.”
Thus, it is literally impossible for ICE to arrest or otherwise
bring enforcement actions against every undocumented immigrant in the country.
Priorities must be set.
The Court has long acknowledged that law enforcement requires
police and similar officials to make decisions about which arrests to make,
which enforcement actions to bring, and how to allocate the limited number of
officers employed by an agency. They told lower courts not to interfere when law
enforcement decides not to target someone for arrest or enforcement.
As the Court held
in Heckler v. Chaney (1985) under Reagan: “An agency’s decision not to
prosecute or enforce, whether through civil or criminal process, is a decision
generally committed to an agency’s absolute discretion, and is attributable in
no small part to the general unsuitability for judicial review of agency
decisions to refuse enforcement.”
So if the leaders of a law enforcement agency decide that a
particular class of people are not a high priority for enforcement, even if
those individuals have violated federal law, Heckler says that judges
like Drew Tipton should generally stay the heck away from that decision.
This general rule, that law enforcement agencies, not
judges, should decide their own enforcement priorities, is known as prosecutorial discretion – it is one of the principles of how police and prosecutors
operate at all levels of the government.
My 2 Cents: The above article is something the GOP seldom talks
about in their constant political DEM blame game which they are famous for rather
than for solving problems, many of which they created all the while they duck, dodge,
deny, and deflect the blame about their involvement or cause in the first place
to others – even sometimes to their own people.
This also from the AP shows what Biden inherited from Trump’s era.
Yes, we have a border
problem and have had it for many years and we still can’t solve it. All the
while we need but seldom admit we need low-income immigrant workers many of
whom are here illegally.
Fact: In 2021, the U.S. Border Patrol confirmed more than 1.6 million encounters with migrants along the US-Mexico border, more than quadruple the number in the previous fiscal year and the largest annual total on record, not just from Mexico, but many other South American countries – people fleeing crime, poverty, and abuse.
I also remind all the GOP hypocrites to never forget this wisdom from Mr. Conservative Himself. – Ronald Reagan
Thanks for stopping by.
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