カテゴリーアーカイブ: Immigration

Immigration Dept revokes passport of two men for creating uneasiness among Malaysians

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PUTRAJAYA: The Immigration Department revoked the passports of sex blogger Alvin Tan and activist Ali Abd Jalil effective immediately, but they still retain their Malaysian citizenship.

Immigration director-general Datuk Mustafa Ibrahim announced this today, saying the two would be informed of the revocation latest by tomorrow by sending a letter to their last known addresses as stated in their passports.

“They are blacklisted in our system. We have just blacklisted Alvin and will do the same for Ali by today,” he said.

Mustafa said the two were the first to have their passports revoked by the immigration department after they had created uneasiness among Malaysians as their actions were seen had gone overboard.

The department, he said, the issuance of a passport was a privilege and not rights given to a citizen.

In this respect, the government had the rights to revoke a passport as clearly stated in the Malaysian passport, Mustafa added.

“The decision to blacklist them is in line with Home Minister (Datuk Seri Dr Zahid Hamidi)’s (statement) and the people’s calls made through various social platforms including via emails to take strict actions against them,” he said.

He added the two could apply for a special travel document-Emergency Certificate (EC)- if they wanted to return to Malaysia.

“They can apply for the EC from the Malaysian embassies,” he said, adding the duo’s status following the revocation of their passports were likened to illegal immigrants without proper travel documents.

On whether the two would be detained once they set foot in Malaysia, Mustafa said that would be the jurisdiction of other agencies.

Alvin Tan was reported to have gone to the United States to seek for asylum and Ali did the same in Sweden.

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Immigration Dept revokes passport of two men for creating uneasiness among Malaysians
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Anti-illegal immigration activists look beyond California for action

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For years, Raul Rodriguez Jr. would let out an exasperated sigh, then move on, whenever he read or heard news about illegal immigration. But something clicked last summer when he saw reports of multitudes of Central Americans illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I’ve got to do something,” Rodriguez, 72, said he told himself. “I’ve got to get off the couch and need to get people involved.”

Rodriguez crafted signs denouncing illegal immigration for various rallies, including one in Murrieta a few days after busloads of Central American detainees were turned back amid vocal protests.

After President Obama announced his immigration reform plan last month, the Apple Valley resident started contacting congressional leaders to express his displeasure.

California’s anti-illegal immigration movement has lost a lot of steam in the 20 years since voters passed Proposition 187, the ballot measure intended to deny taxpayer-funded services to those in the country illegally.

Polls consistently show that Californians don’t see illegal immigration as the same type of threat they did in the 1990s, and a September USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll showed 73% of voters support some type of path to citizenship for those here illegally.

But the last few months have shown that the anti-illegal immigration forces remain small but potent — and a movement that backers hope will get stronger with Obama’s action.

Tactics this time are changing. Robin Hvidston, president of We the People Rising, a Claremont organization, said her group and other California activists have focused on targeting congressional leaders outside the state because they know there’s little they can do here.

“They see their only hope being the national government,” said Roy H. Beck, who heads NumbersUSA, a powerful national advocacy group opposing illegal immigration. “They don’t see a solution coming from inside California.”

People Rising and other groups campaigning against illegal immigration say they are experiencing a modest uptick in public interest and support as immigration has emerged as a big issue this year, a trend confirmed by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But it’s not exactly a groundswell.

The protests in Murrieta garnered days of national attention and inspired similar demonstrations throughout the nation, according to activists and the poverty law center.

Obama’s plan, which would give work permits and temporary protection from deportation to nearly 5 million who are in the country illegally, did generate some protests, but they were decidedly small-scale. One last month in Rancho Cucamonga drew just six demonstrators.

Activists in California say that once the new Congress takes office in January, they are planning a phone and fax blitz in response to Obama’s move. Plans to join rallies in Washington, D.C., are also in the works.

Movement leaders said they want Congress to fight Obama’s executive action and to further secure the border with Mexico.

The renewed activity opposing illegal immigration in California reflects what’s happening on a national level, Beck said.

“They’re all enraged and engaged,” Beck said. “This issue is a white-hot priority within our followers.”

Leo Chavez, professor of anthropology at UC Irvine who has researched and written about the movement against illegal immigration, said an uptick in such activity is common when there are national events with high-media exposure, such as the border crisis last summer.

But whether the momentum will be sustainable is a question, especially in California, where dramatic political and demographic changes have taken place since the heyday of the movement in the 1990s.

Polling shows that Californians still have concerns about illegal immigration.

In the September USC/Times poll, 72% of respondents said illegal immigration is a crisis or major problem. The response was shared across ethnic, ideological, income and geographic lines, the poll found, even by those who support a path to citizenship for people who are in the country illegally.

Still, the state’s movement is a shadow of what it was in 1994, when California voters approved Proposition 187, a measure to deny public services — such as public schooling and healthcare — to people in the country illegally. Most of its provisions were struck down in court.

The movement deflated a bit, then picked up steam in 2005 with the rise of the Minuteman Project — a civilian militia patrol led by Jim Gilchrist of Orange County. The group took to patrolling the Mexican border in Arizona.

But infighting, violence and accusations of corruption dismantled the movement. The 2011 conviction of Minutemen member Shawna Forde in the murders of a man and his 9-year-old daughter in southern Arizona scarred the cause and drove many people out of the movement.

Many of the movement’s most active participants moved into the tea party, which put immigration on the back burner and focused their energy on defeating a number of Obama’s efforts, such as the Affordable Care Act, said Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extreme right-wing and hate groups.

At the height of the movement in 2010, the center tracked more than 300 such groups. After that, it dipped dramatically to just about 30 last year.

Chavez, who has tracked anti-illegal immigration groups for years and wrote “The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation,” said that the movement in California lost a lot of its momentum because of the demographic shift that has occurred since the mid-1990s.

This year, Latinos became the largest single ethnic group in the state, making up 39% of the population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

“Latinos are definitely a force to be reckoned with in California,” Chavez said.

After California, the crusade against illegal immigration moved east toward Arizona after a series of immigration-enforcement laws were passed there, but many were ultimately struck down by the courts.

Now, all eyes are on Texas, where conservative legislators have adopted many of the movement’s goals, especially after the crisis along the Texas border last summer.

“This is where California was in the 1990s,” Beck said.

Rodriguez, born in El Paso, Texas, to a U.S.-born mother and a father of Mexican origin who became a naturalized U.S. citizen and fought in World War II, said he doesn’t know whether his father came to the U.S. legally.

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Anti-illegal immigration activists look beyond California for action
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Volokh Conspiracy: Obama administration decides to continue the use of racial profiling in immigration law enforcement

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After a lengthy review of racial and ethnic profiling in federal law enforcement policy, the Obama administration has decided to allow the practice to continue in immigration law enforcement:

The Obama administration will soon issue new rules curtailing the use of profiling, but federal agents will still be allowed to consider race and ethnicity when stopping people at airports, border crossings and immigration checkpoints, according to several government officials.

The new policy has been in the works for years and will replace decade-old rules that banned racial profiling for federal law enforcement, but with specific exemptions for national security and border investigations. Immigration enforcement has proved to be the most controversial aspect of the Obama administration’s revisions, and law enforcement officials succeeded in arguing that they should have more leeway in deciding whom to stop and question.


I. The Enormous Scope of Racial and Ethnic Profiling in Immigration Enforcement.

As the New York Times notes in the above-linked article, federal officials are permitted to use racial profiling in areas far beyond the border, as that term is understood by laypeople:

Federal agents have jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the borders, including the coastlines, an area that includes roughly a third of the United States, and nearly two-thirds of its population. Federal agents board buses and Amtrak trains in upstate New York, questioning passengers about their citizenship and detaining people who cannot produce immigration papers. Border Patrol agents also run inland checkpoints looking for illegal immigrants. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, has called the existing rules “a license to profile.”

The areas in question have large Hispanic and Asian-American populations, and therefore large numbers of
people likely to be victimized by racial profiling of the sort that the Obama administration has decided to continue.

II. Why Conservative Advocates of Color-blind Government Should Oppose Racial Profiling in Law Enforcement.

This decision is likely to disappoint liberal opponents of racial profiling. The president could easily forbid racial profiling in federal immigration enforcement by issuing an executive order banning it. If anything is within the scope of executive discretion in law enforcement, it is the tactics used by federal law enforcement agencies. Yet he has chosen not to do so. In fairness, he is, in this case, continuing practices that predate his administration. But the fact that previous administrations did the same thing is a poor excuse for an administration that prides itself on promoting racial justice and a president who promised to bring “change we can believe in.”

The perpetuation of racial profiling in immigration enforcement should also trouble conservative advocates of racial color-blindess by government. If they truly believe, as Chief Justice John Roberts puts it, that “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” they cannot allow a giant exception to this principle when it comes to law enforcement, whether in immigration law or elsewhere.

As I explained here and here, most of the reasons conservatives cite for opposing racial preferences in college admissions also apply to the use of racial profiling in law enforcement. In both cases, government uses race as a tool for economizing on information costs.

Conservative defenders of racial and ethnic profiling argue that it is justified because members of some racial and ethnic groups have much higher crime rates than others, and in a world of imperfect information, government should target enforcement efforts on those groups. A Hispanic-looking person in a border area is much more likely to be an illegal immigrant than, say, a white Anglo-Saxon. If federal officials had perfect information about each person they encounter, they would not need to use race as a proxy. But unfortunately, they don’t. But defenders of racial preferences in admissions can make exactly the same type of argument. An African-American applicant is, on average, more likely to have been the victim of racial discrimination than a white one. Similarly, members of some racial and ethnic groups are more likely to contribute to diversity than others. If we had perfect information about each applicant, admissions officers would not need to use race as a proxy. But unfortunately they don’t.

Conservatives rightly reject these sorts of rationales in the college admissions context. They point out that the use of even statistically accurate racial generalizations by government still inflicts injustices on innocent individuals and exacerbates racial conflict. They also emphasize that once racial discrimination becomes institutionalized, it is difficult to limit its scope. But exactly the same points apply to the use of racial discrimination in law enforcement. It too inevitably victimizes large numbers of innocent people, exacerbates racial tensions, and tends to expand once established.

In recent years, some conservatives have begun to recognize the tension between opposition to affirmative action and support for racial profiling, and have become more critical of the latter. My George Mason colleague Nelson Lund, a prominent conservative legal scholar, was among the first conservative commentators to do so.

Some conservatives, such as Jonah Goldberg nonetheless, continue to argue that racial profiling is more defensible than affirmative action because it inflicts only minor harms on its victims, whereas racial preferences in college admissions inflict much greater damage, perhaps even a “lifetime loss” for students unable to attend their preferred college. This theory is flawed for reasons I outlined here:

Whether affirmative action causes more harm to its victims than racial profiling varies from case to case. In some situations, getting stopped by the police will be a “lifetime loss” too, especially if nervousness or overreaction by either side causes a misunderstanding that escalates into violence. In other cases, it could result in your being detained for hours even if you are never charged with any crime (especially if the officer thinks you haven’t demonstrated the proper “respect” for his authority). The fear that racial profiling engenders among lower-class blacks and Hispanics (including those who never actually get profiled themselves) is also a significant cost.

White and Asian victims of affirmative action sometimes do suffer great losses… In many cases, however, they simply end up attending universities comparable to or only slightly less prestigious than those that rejected them. As with racial profiling, the magnitude of the loss varies widely from case to case.

I would add that the perpetuation of racial profiling also poisons relations between law enforcement and minority communities. If Hispanic immigrants believe that the government is treating them as second-class citizens – a perception likely to be reinforced by widespread racial profiling – that is likely to impede their assimilation and increase ethnic hostility. These too are significant potential harms that go beyond the often modest short term inconveniences of being stopped by law enforcement officials.


III. What if Racial Discrimination is the Only Way to Enforce Our Current System of Immigration Restrictions?

The New York Times article reports that the Obama administration ultimately decided to allow racial profiling in immigration enforcement to continue because the Department of Homeland Security claimed that immigration restrictions can’t be enforced without it:

“The immigration investigators have said, ‘We can’t do our job without taking ethnicity into account. We are very dependent on that,’ ” said one official briefed on the new rules. “They want to have the least amount of restrictions holding them back.”

If it really is true that current immigration restrictions can’t be enforced without large-scale racial and ethnic discrimination, that is a massive strike against them. It highlights the extent to which such policies unjustly victimize not only would-be immigrants, but also legal residents and American citizens.

I recognize that there might be extreme cases where racial and ethnic discrimination by government is the only way to prevent some great evil that cannot be forestalled otherwise. If, hypothetically, racial profiling were the only way to prevent an imminent nuclear terrorist attack that will kill millions, it could well be justified in such a case. But even if we aren’t willing to say that the government should never be allowed to engage in racial discrimination for any reason, there should at least be a very strong presumption against such policies. I am skeptical that the supposed need to deport more immigrants, most of whom merely seek to escape Third World poverty and oppression, even comes close to overcoming that presumption. If racial discrimination really is essential to the enforcement of current immigration law, that’s not a justification for racial profiling, but a justification for liberalizing immigration law.

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Volokh Conspiracy: Obama administration decides to continue the use of racial profiling in immigration law enforcement
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Farage Blames Immigration For UKIP Event No-Show

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Nigel Farage has blamed immigration for failing to turn up at a UKIP event in Wales at which 100 people had paid £25 each to meet him.

The UKIP leader said that population growth had resulted in a snarled-up M4 motorway that made the journey take far longer than expected.

He has been accused of a lack of professionalism after failing to attend the “Meet Nigel Farage” evening in Port Talbot.

“It took me six hours and 15 minutes to get here – it should have taken three-and-a-half to four,” he told BBC’s Sunday Politics Wales.

“That has nothing to do with professionalism, what it does have to do with is a country in which the population is going through the roof chiefly because of open-door immigration and the fact that the M4 is not as navigable as it used to be.”

The comment was immediately attacked by Labour with the shadow Welsh secretary, Owen Smith, tweeting: “Thought I’d heard it all but @Nigel_Farage has just blamed immigration for clogging the M4 and making him late for his keynote speech.”

He added that the remarks made Mr Farage “dangerous” – and said he was using “dog-whistle politics”.

But Mr Farage was not backing down, hitting out at other “vanilla” politicians who failed to speak their minds.

He then took to Twitter about his view, writing: “Can’t make it up: Tory minister says immigration strains roads and no one bats an eyelid. I say it and Mail & Telegraph fake outrage.”

It came after he announced that UKIP had appointed Paul Lambert – a former BBC producer known as “Gobby” for his famous shouts at the Prime Minister and others – as director of communications. Mr Farage described him as “one of the best in town”.

And another senior UKIP politician – MEP Patrick O’Flynn – admitted that Mr Farage was a domineering figure in the party, saying: “It’s not just Nigel Farage but clearly we have a party leader who leads, which is a bit of an innovation in contemporary politics.”

The former journalist added: “I remember Tony Blair in my days as a journalist saying to me ‘you are either a control freak or you have lost control’.

“And if you have to decide which side of that fence to go on, then having control is probably the right option.”

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House leaders move to avoid immigration showdown

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Trying to avoid a showdown over immigration, House Republican leaders are moving to make a deal with Democrats to pass a spending bill that would keep the government running past next week.

The emerging strategy follows legislation passed Thursday by the House declaring President Barack Obama’s executive actions to curb deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to be “null and void.” That legislation wasn’t enough for some conservatives, who complained that the only way to stop Obama’s actions on immigration would be to forbid them in legislation that must pass if the government is to stay open.

Republican leaders are opposed to that course of action, fearing a government shutdown that they don’t want, and they plan to rely on Democratic votes to pass a bill to keep the government going.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Democrats were committed to keeping the government open, but she warned that Republicans could lose their support if they include too many contentious so-called policy riders in the spending bill, on issues like school lunch nutrition standards and water quality.

“We haven’t seen the bill. But there are some very destructive riders in it that would be unacceptable to us and, I think, unacceptable to the American people,” Pelosi said.

“The responsibility to keep government open is theirs. If the bill is anything that we can support, we will,” added Pelosi, who has more leverage in the negotiations because of Boehner’s likely need to rely on her to deliver Democratic votes.

Lorella Praeli, 26, of New Haven, Conn., originally …

The spending bill would pay for the operations of most government agencies for a year while extending the Homeland Security Department operations only for a few months. Homeland Security includes the immigration agencies that would carry out Obama’s executive actions, so the approach would allow Republicans to revisit them early next year, once they have control of the Senate and a bigger majority in the House.

“We think this is the most practical way to fight the president’s action,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

Several conservative lawmakers sounded resigned Thursday to being ignored by Boehner, who with a bigger majority next year will have more room to maneuver around balky tea party lawmakers.

“My assumption is that the fix is in and they don’t need us,” said Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz. “They’re going to vote this with a large number of Democrats.”

The omnibus spending bill would cover the approximately one-third of the budget dedicated to day-to-day operations of Cabinet agencies. There’s slightly more than $1 trillion for the Pentagon and domestic agencies plus more than $70 billion to tackle overseas military operations in Afghanistan and to fight Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. Obama appeared likely to get most of his $6.2 billion request for fighting Ebola at home and in Africa but not the infrastructure money he has requested.

Most of the money issues are largely worked out, House Appropriations Committee spokeswoman Jennifer Hing said. But many of the policy riders, on environmental regulations, long-haul trucker hours, labor relations and more are unresolved.

GOP Rep. Harold Rogers of Kentucky, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, hopes to achieve the framework of a deal with Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, chairwoman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, by the end of Friday and release it Monday.

The bill on deportations, approved on a 219-197 vote, put the House on record against Obama’s actions granting work permits to more than 4 million immigrants in the country illegally. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., was among those who wanted more direct action to block what the president is doing.

“Having said we’re going to do everything we can to stop this — and then to do nothing to stop it — really hurts,” he said.

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Gardner and Coffman split votes on symbolic immigration bill

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Two Colorado Republican congressmen who campaigned as advocates for immigration reform have split on their votes for a symbolic measure to overturn President Obama’s recent executive orders on immigration.

Current Congressman and Senator-elect Cory Gardner voted Thursday with most House Republicans in support of the Preventing Executive Overreach on Immigration Act. Rep. Mike Coffman broke ranks and voted against the measure, H.R. 5759, which was introduced by Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Florida. Coffman was one of only seven House Republicans to oppose the bill.

Coffman, once a hard-liner on immigration, softened his stance last year.

But in a statement on his nay vote on the Yoho bill, Coffman made clear his vote had nothing to do with support for Obama’s executive orders.

“I voted against H.R. 5797 because, although I strongly believe it is unconstitutional to have immigration policy made through executive orders and without consent of Congress, this legislation will only mislead the American people into believing that we are taking care of the problem when the only way to address President Obama’s overreach is either through the U.S. Supreme Court or through the appropriations process,” Coffman’s statement read.

A spokesman for Coffman’s office said that does not mean he supports a government shutdown.

Gardner, who represents the 4th Congressional District where nearly 29 percent of the voters are Latino, quickly followed his vote with a statement stressing he still favors immigration reform.

“Congress must act on immigration reform and both sides have to set aside political gamesmanship to achieve real solutions. … We owe it to generations past and generations to come to find a solution to our broken immigration system,” Gardner’s statement read.

Obama’s executive orders that prompted the Yoho bill would give protection to about 5 million migrants who are in the country without legal permission. That includes more than 60,000 in Colorado. The orders are planned to go into effect next spring.

Immigration and human rights groups expressed disappointment with those who supported the Yoho measure.

The bill is “nothing more than a symbolic attack on the common-sense policies recently announced by President Obama to restore balance to our immigration enforcement policies,” read a statement from Wade Henderson, president of The Leadership Conference on on Civil and Human Rights.

The bill, which passed 219-197, is symbolic because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, has said he won’t take up the legislation in the Senate. The White House has also threatened to veto any such legislation.

Except for Coffman, the Colorado delegation voted along predictable party lines. Democratic representatives Diana DeGette, Jared Polis and Ed Perlmutter all voted against the bill. Republican representatives Doug Lamborn, Scott Tipton and Gardner voted for it.

Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957, nlofholm@denverpost.com or twitter.com/nlofholm

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Republicans Protest Obama Immigration Order in Symbolic Vote

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The U.S. House voted to block
President Barack Obama’s immigration orders in a symbolic move
meant to clear the way for action next week to fund the U.S.
government and avoid a shutdown.

The 219-197 vote today allowed Republicans to vent their
frustration over Obama’s decision to ease deportation rules for
millions of undocumented immigrants without holding up a
spending bill. Some Republicans wanted to attach the immigration
language to a government spending measure, which would have led
to a standoff with Democrats.

“The American people were crystal clear about their
dislike” of Obama’s action on immigration, third-ranking House
Republican Steve Scalise of Louisiana said during today’s floor
debate. “This legislation says ‘you can’t do that, Mr.
President. There’s a rule of law.’”

Current government funding ends Dec. 11. House
Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, said
today that he and his Senate counterpart, Democrat Barbara Mikulski, plan tomorrow to “sign off on the final deal” to
fund most of the government through September 2015.

A previously skeptical Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic
leader, signaled that the funding bill is likely to get her
members’ support if Boehner entertains some Democratic demands.

“Let us supply the votes to keep government open but we
can’t do that unless we have a bill worthy of our support,”
Pelosi of California told reporters today.

Democratic Opposition

Still, many Democrats spoke against the immigration measure
today.

“Prior presidents were not met with such obstructionism,”
said Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, who has
negotiated with Republicans on immigration legislation. “He
cannot change the law and he has not done so. He does have the
authority to grant temporary relief to some.”

Boehner and his lieutenants in the House devised the two-step strategy to keep the dispute over immigration from causing
a repeat of the 16-day partial shutdown in October 2013, which
stemmed from a Republican bid to use spending legislation to
defund Obamacare.

The Senate doesn’t plan to take up today’s immigration
bill, and the Obama administration said the president would veto
the measure if it reached his desk.

The second step requires both chambers to pass a separate
measure funding almost all of the federal government.

“We think this is the most practical way to fight the
president’s actions,” Boehner of Ohio told reporters today.

Leaders’ Concession

In a minor concession to some conservatives, House leaders
are considering a revision that would move up a fight over
immigration funding to soon after Congress reconvenes in January
instead of in March.

Democrats want to cut from the spending bill at least 70
Republican-sponsored provisions that would poke holes in Obama’s
policies on the environment, health care and other matters,
Representative Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat, said yesterday.

“We are like Amtrak,” Mikulski of Maryland, the Senate
appropriations chair, said today. “We’ve left the station,
we’re headed to our destination and we will have some stops
along the way.”

Under Boehner’s approach, the Department of Homeland
Security, with primary responsibility for immigration policy,
would be funded only into March 2015.

Senate Majority

That would set up a clash over Obama’s immigration orders
early next year, when Boehner and incoming Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell will face more pressure from the expanded
Republican majority to retaliate against Obama’s orders.

Republicans won control of the Senate and increased their
House majority in November’s election.

Boehner said the Homeland Security funding strategy lets
Republicans keep “our leverage so that when we have
reinforcements in the Senate, we’re in the strongest position to
take additional action to fight the president’s unilateral
action.”

“There are three or four general arrows that are being
talked about. Leadership, to their credit, is listening,” said
Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican.

Some opponents of Boehner’s approach want funding for
immigration-related agencies to expire in January so the new
Republican-led Congress can defund parts of the agency tasked
with carrying out Obama’s orders. Boehner may agree to move the
date to February, according to a Republican aide who sought
anonymity to describe the private talks.

Obama Encouraged

Obama said yesterday he was encouraged by statements from
Boehner and McConnell about preventing another shutdown, “and I
take them at their word.”

“The one thing I can say for certain is that no one
benefits by the government shutting down,” the president told
members of the Business Roundtable in Washington.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid said he would be
open to Boehner’s approach if Republican leaders could gather
enough House votes to advance it.

Still, some Republicans in Congress favor an immediate
fight over Obama’s immigration orders by holding up funding for
immigration-related agencies starting next week.

“The entire constitutional structure is at stake,”
Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who opposes the
funding measure, said today. “I don’t think it’s dawned on
people” and “I don’t think we should be timid about it.”

‘Show Vote’

At a news conference yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas
said passing a symbolic bill against the deportation orders
would be a “meaningless show vote.”

Cruz, who led the drive for the 2013 shutdown, said
Congress should pass a short-term spending bill that blocks
Obama’s immigration orders through funding for the Department of
Homeland Security and Department of Justice.

Cruz also said the Senate should block confirmations for
all non-national security presidential appointments.

Reid said the Senate won’t consider the House immigration
bill, H.R. 5759, which would deny the president authority to
protect undocumented immigrants in the U.S. from deportation.

Obama announced Nov. 20 that he would temporarily halt
deportations for about 5 million undocumented immigrants in the
U.S. His directive will defer for three years the deportation of
people who came to the U.S. as children as well as parents of
children who are citizens or legal permanent residents.

The Department of Homeland Security will streamline the
visa process for foreign workers and their employers and give
high-skilled workers more flexible work authorization.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Heidi Przybyla in Washington at
hprzybyla@bloomberg.net;
Erik Wasson in Washington at
ewasson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Jodi Schneider at
jschneider50@bloomberg.net
Laurie Asseo

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Hardliners push opposing Obama immigration actions

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WASHINGTON (AP) — In a defiant challenge to GOP leaders, immigration hardliners in Congress announced Wednesday they will oppose upcoming legislation to keep the government open. They demanded specific provisions to stop President Barack Obama’s executive actions that granted a reprieve from deportation for millions.

“We aren’t with our vote going to give him one dime to execute his illegal action, and we believe the American people are going to stand with us,” said Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., at a press conference outside the Capitol where she was joined by other House conservatives and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

Cruz warned against “having a meaningless show vote” and said: “We should announce we mean what we say, we will use our constitutional authorities to force this president to faithfully execute the laws.”

The growing conservative opposition was a problem for House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders a day after they presented House Republicans with a two-part plan to respond to Obama’s move on immigration and keep the government running past Dec. 11, when a current funding measure expires.

The plan involved voting on stand-alone legislation this week to declare Obama’s immigration move “null and void.” Then next week, lawmakers would pass a spending bill that funds most government operations for a year but keeps the Department of Homeland Security running only for a few months. Since Homeland Security overseas immigration issues, the approach is meant to maintain leverage over those programs and revisit them next year when Republicans will control both the House and the Senate.

But for the most conservative House members, the approach does not do enough to rein in Obama, who incited GOP wrath with his move last month to grant work permits to some 4 million immigrants living in the country illegally. These conservatives dismiss the stand-alone bill planned for this week as a meaningless gesture, since it would face certain death in the Senate, and are pushing for the spending bill to include language stripping out money to enact Obama’s plans.

Party leaders and many more pragmatic Republicans fear such an approach could result in a government shutdown since Obama would be sure to veto any such measure.

“I just don’t think it’s the time in the process where we need to be digging in our heels and drawing red lines in the sand and threatening potential shutdowns and a lot of upheaval,” said Rep. Steve Womack, R-Ark.

Many of the same lawmakers now working to oppose Boehner on immigration helped provoke a government shutdown a year ago in a failed attempt to stop Obama’s health care law. Republican leaders have made crystal clear they want to avoid a repeat of that outcome, although the political damage turned out to be short-lived.

Then, as now, Cruz crossed the Capitol to prod House Republicans to defy their leaders and withhold support, and outside groups such as Heritage Action agitated for confrontation.

The conservative opposition may mean that House GOP leaders have to rely on some Democratic votes to approve their funding measure. It’s not clear how much Democratic support there would be, and several Democrats said they were withholding judgment for now. But the situation will likely give Democrats more leverage over the content of the spending measures.

At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest left open the possibility Obama could sign the spending measure being developed by Republicans, even with the shortened funding piece for the Homeland Security Department.

Obama himself said he understood Republicans would “take a couple stabs at rolling back” his executive actions but said he hoped a legislative solution would then become possible. “Temperatures need to cool a bit in the wake of my executive action,” he said at a meeting with business leaders.

Meanwhile a 17-state coalition led by Texas filed a lawsuit against Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

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17 states sue to stop Obama's immigration plan

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Texas and 16 other states sued the federal government and immigration agencies in U.S. District Court on Wednesday to try to derail President Obama’s executive action deferring deportation for up to 5 million people, arguing it was unconstitutional and would worsen the humanitarian crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border.

State officials noted in their filing: “This lawsuit is not about immigration. It is about the rule of law, presidential power and the structural limits of the U.S. Constitution.”

Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican attorney general and the governor-elect, announced the lawsuit in Austin, accusing Obama of issuing “an executive decree that requires federal agencies to award legal benefits to individuals whose conduct contradicts the priorities of Congress.”

“The president is abdicating his responsibility to faithfully enforce laws that were duly enacted by Congress and attempting to rewrite immigration laws, which he has no authority to do,” Abbott said. The president’s actions amount to “executive disregard of the separation of powers,” he said.

The Obama administration says prosecutorial discretion gives the president the power to take such action.

The states’ lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville. Defendants include the federal government and the heads of several agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The states that joined Texas in the lawsuit are Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Also Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry called for increased support from Washington for border security, saying in a statement that Obama’s executive action could spark another “mass migration.”

After an immigrant influx of more than 68,000 unaccompanied children across the border this year — many via Texas’ Rio Grande Valley — Perry ordered a surge of state law enforcement and the National Guard.

Although the number of immigrants caught crossing Texas’ southern border has plummeted 73% since June, state lawmakers this week extended the law enforcement surge through August.

On Wednesday, Perry ordered state agencies to use the E-Verify system to screen employee eligibility.

“Texas’ increased law enforcement presence in the border region is all the more necessary as the federal government continues to ignore the very real issue of border security in favor of political posturing on immigration,” Perry said. “Without border security, immigration reform is a fruitless exercise.”

molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com

Twitter: @mollyhf

 

 

 

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

UPDATES

3:28 p.m.: The story was updated throughout with new details and information.

The story was originally posted at 2:13 p.m.

 

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Obama Cabinet Shuffle Risks Further Immigration Fights

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President Barack Obama may pick another immigration fight with Republicans by selecting Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to run the Pentagon.

Johnson and Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro “Ali” Mayorkas were leading architects of Obama’s recently announced policy protecting as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. Mayorkas, a Cuba-born former federal prosecutor, would be the early favorite to succeed Johnson at Homeland Security, according to administration officials and immigrant-rights activists.

He is “the only person who could step into that job and be ready for it on Day One,” said Ben Johnson, executive director of the American Immigration Council.

Such a double move, after Obama signed orders that infuriated Republicans by protecting undocumented immigrants from prosecution, would keep the immigration fight front and center as Democrats try to energize Hispanic voters for the 2016 presidential and congressional elections.

The Swerving Path to Citizenship

Mayorkas was confirmed to his current job last December on a 54-41 Senate vote that came less than a month after Democrats changed the chamber’s rules to make it harder for the minority party to filibuster nominations. No Republican voted in favor of him. And Republican lawmakers have accused Mayorkas of improperly influencing government decisions to help political allies during his career as a federal prosecutor and Homeland Security official.

Police Endorsement

Even so, Mayorkas is a White House favorite who won the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police when Obama was considering his options for replacing outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder. Because he’s the No. 2 at Homeland now, Mayorkas could run the department, at least on a temporary basis, without winning Senate confirmation.

White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri declined to comment on the status of Obama’s search for a new defense secretary or the possibility that Mayorkas would take over at Homeland Security if Johnson goes to the Pentagon.

Two administration officials, who requested anonymity to discuss personnel matters, said a Johnson-Mayorkas move would amount to one-and-a-half nomination fights. Mayorkas would be the tougher of the two, because he’s so thoroughly connected to the White House immigration policy and because Homeland Security is responsible for implementing Obama’s orders.

While Johnson’s role in Obama’s immigration policy may hurt him in any confirmation fight with Republicans, the Pentagon isn’t the lead agency in determining which undocumented immigrants can stay without fear of prosecution.

Hagel Departure

Obama has had to reconsider his short list for replacing departing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who announced his resignation Nov. 24 after months of fighting policy battles against White House aides.

Johnson’s name surfaced last week when Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, and Michele Flournoy, Obama’s former undersecretary of defense for policy, took themselves out of the running. Former Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter remains the favorite among many Washington insiders.

Robert Raben, a Washington lobbyist and chairman of the Hispanic National Bar Association’s Endorsements Committee, said it makes sense for Obama to look to veterans of his administration as his tenure winds down.

“In the final two years, there’s a premium paid on folks who are already in the administration who are up to speed on the issues and have show their political mettle,” Raben said.

Mayorkas “is as, or more, qualified than anyone in the country,” he said.

Depth Chart

As deputy secretary, Mayorkas is first in line to take the reins should Johnson, a former general counsel at the Pentagon, leave Homeland Security for the Defense Department, and immigrant-rights advocates said he probably would be at or near the top of the list to take the job on a permanent basis.

While Obama has the authority to go further down the depth chart of political appointees to pick an acting secretary, these immigrant-rights activists said that could cause a backlash among Hispanic organizations.

Before becoming the No. 2 official at Homeland Security, Mayorkas ran the department’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office, which was responsible for implementing Obama’s 2012 order preventing the prosecution and deportation of certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Nomination Blocked

Republican senators blocked Mayorkas’s nomination to the deputy slot for six months in 2013. They cited what they called lax standards for accepting applications for protection from immigration-related prosecution under Obama’s 2012 order and a then-ongoing Homeland Security Inspector General’s Office investigation into whether Mayorkas allowed improper influence in the office’s immigrant-investor program, known as EB-5.

In addition, the Republicans said, there was a pattern of Mayorkas improperly influencing government decisions. A 2002 report issued by the Republican-run House Government Reform Committee faulted Mayorkas, then the leading federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, for calling the White House to advocate for the commutation of a drug-trafficking sentence being served by Carlos Vignali, the son of a prominent Southern California businessman and political donor.

Senator Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said on the Senate floor Dec. 17, 2013, that documents obtained from whistle-blowers “appear to show him intervening in EB-5 decisions involving Gulf Coast Funds Management, an organization run by nobody other than Hillary Clinton’s brother Anthony Rodham,” and GreenTech Automotive, a company that had been run by Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

‘External Influences’

The inspector general’s report, dated Dec. 12 of that year, found that “when external parties inquired about program activities USCIS did not always document their decisions and responses to these inquiries, making the Employment-Based Fifth Preference regional center program appear vulnerable to perceptions of internal and external influences.” It did not find wrongdoing on the part of Mayorkas or other officials.

During his confirmation hearing in July 2013, Mayorkas denied acting improperly in that matter or any other.

“I have never in my career used undue influence to influence the outcome of a case,” he said, calling a meeting with McAuliffe to hear complaints “the extent of the interaction.”

Between the time the report was sent to Mayorkas and the time it was made public, the Senate voted to confirm him to the deputy secretary post.

‘Obvious Challenges’

There are also mixed feelings among immigrant-rights advocates about Johnson leaving Homeland Security in the middle of the fight over Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Republicans, they say, are eager to undo what Obama has done.

When his name first emerged last week as a possible Hagel successor, “We all started thinking, ‘Oh God, right after this major announcement,’” said Marshall Fitz, the vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a policy-research group that’s close to the White House.

“For him to then be leaving the agency would create some obvious challenges and concerns,” Fitz said. “There would be a lot more trepidation” about Johnson’s possible departure if “Ali hadn’t been there stride for stride.”

The more recent Obama action, signed late last month, expanded the number of those immigrants eligible for protection and added categories including the undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens and legal residents.

‘Constitutional Crisis’

Republicans, caught between the party base’s anger over illegal immigration and the political imperative of courting Hispanic voters, uniformly criticized Obama for using executive power to implement his policy.

“Unfortunately for the American people, the president has ignored their opinions and forged ahead with his plan, creating a constitutional crisis and an untold number of consequences for the American people and legal immigrants,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte said last month.

Johnson is scheduled to testify tomorrow before the House Homeland Security Committee on Obama’s immigration plan.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Allen in Washington at jallen149@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Gordon at cgordon39@bloomberg.net Michael Shepard

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