WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s possible delay in taking action on immigration has thrown advocates and lawmakers from both parties a curveball, barely two months before the midterm elections.

Democrats who were bracing for the impact that Obama’s long-awaited announcement would have on their campaigns are now rethinking aspects of their strategy for the fall. Republicans who were considering legislative attempts to block Obama must reconsider whether that’s the best use of the few remaining work weeks before Election Day.

And immigration advocates, already frustrated by how long it’s taken Obama to act, must decide whether to pressure the president publicly to stop stalling or remain hopeful he’ll give them a favorable outcome in the end.

Obama in June said that by the end of the summer, he’d announce what steps he had decided to take to fix the nation’s immigration system in the absence of a legislative fix from Capitol Hill. But Obama backed away from that deadline on Thursday, and the White House on Friday acknowledged it was possible the decision would slip past the end of summer. It was unclear whether any delay would be a mere matter of weeks or could push the announcement past the November elections.

“The president is determined to take the kinds of steps that are available to him,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest. But he added he had no details about when that would happen.

Reluctant to be seen as putting on the brakes for political reasons, White House officials suggested that if the decision slips past summer, it would be because of the situation on the border, not the election.

For months, the Obama administration has been working to stem the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing into the U.S. Those numbers have declined, but officials have said the numbers could creep back up as cooler temperatures arrive in the fall.

The White House has been coy about what options Obama is considering, but much of the focus has centered on steps Obama could take to defer deportations for millions of people in the U.S. illegally, effectively granting them permission to remain and work in the U.S. Republicans say that’s beyond Obama’s authority and even a few endangered Democrats have said Obama should look to Congress to take that step.

For Democrats, who are fighting most of their toughest races this year in conservative-leaning states that are leery of Obama, presidential action has been seen as a likely liability in the election, fueling GOP arguments that Obama is exceeding his authority and that he and Democrats are refusing to enforce immigration laws. Chris Lehane, a California-based Democratic strategist, said the timing of Obama’s action could affect whether voters enthusiastic about immigration show up to vote.

“All of these elections are going to be so laser-tight — 5,000 votes one way or the other — that at some level, what’s out there at the broader, national level at election time could push things over the edge,” Lehane said.

Obama’s timing could affect congressional action on a must-pass spending bill to fund government operations into December. Congress is expected to make that its first order of business when lawmakers return from their summer recess after Labor Day.

A number of Republicans have raised the possibility of using that legislation to block Obama from expanding deportation deferrals or granting work permits to those here illegally. Such a move would set up a confrontation between the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate that raises the specter of a government shutdown, which would likely be blamed on Republicans and could hurt their prospects in November.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has been urging Obama not to act alone on immigration, and warned the president in a letter this week that doing so would imperil prospects for overhauling immigration laws after the election. Rubio’s spokesman, Alex Conant, called the apparent delay a positive sign and one he hoped Obama would make permanent.

“It appears that the White House made a short-term political calculation that this was bad for them in the midterms,” Conant said.

Immigration advocates were taken aback by word of the potential delay, having been given no advance warning by the White House. Kica Matos of the Fair Immigration Reform Movement said that after spending months keeping the pressure on Obama, the group had been shifting into preparations for the announcement itself. Now, Matos said, exhausted advocates will have keep up the pressure to ensure Obama doesn’t get cold feet and call off the announcement altogether.

“They say they’re going to move forward, then somebody goes boo and then they hide,” Matos said.

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Associated Press writer Andrew Taylor contributed to this report.

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Follow Josh Lederman at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP and Erica Werner at http://twitter.com/ericawerner

• Politics & Government
• Government
• Barack Obama
• White House
• immigration laws

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government immigration board has determined for the first time that domestic violence victims may be able to qualify for asylum in the United States. The ruling comes in the case of a Guatemalan woman who crossed into the U.S. illegally in 2005 after fleeing her husband.

She said she called local police in Guatemala to report the abuse but was repeatedly told that the authorities would not interfere in her marriage. She argued that the abuse and the lack of police response should make her eligible for asylum.

In the first-of-its kind ruling Tuesday, the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals agreed, at least in part. In the nine-page decision, the appeals board concluded that the unidentified immigrant met at least one criterion for asylum: as a married Guatemalan woman who couldn’t leave her relationship, she was part of a particular social group.

The Homeland Security Department, which prosecutes deportation cases, did not contest the immigrant’s argument. The appeals board sent the case back to an immigration judge.

The board sent the case back to an immigration judge for a final ruling.

The ruling by the board that decides appeals from federal immigration courts is significant because it means that the government now recognizes domestic violence victims as a potentially protected class of people seeking refuge in the United States.

The decision establishes a broad and firm foothold for an untold number of women whose asylum claims have been routinely denied in the past.

But proving all the elements of any asylum case can still be difficult. Those seeking protection have to prove they will be persecuted in their home country because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. They also have to prove that their home government is either involved in the persecution or unable or unwilling to stop it.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the ruling will impact thousands of pending asylum cases and thousands more that could be filed now that the government has recognized domestic violence victims as a potential class of persecuted people.

More than 62,000 people traveling as families, most of them women and young children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, have been apprehended at the Mexican border since Oct. 1. They all face deportation.

Even though ultimately winning asylum in the U.S. is a long shot for most immigrants, just having a pending asylum case in immigration court can be something of a victory for immigrants fearful of being sent home. Those who can convince a federal asylum officer that their case should be heard by a judge are allowed to stay in the country and legally work while their case is decided. Because of a backlog of about 375,000 pending deportation cases, that process can take several years.

Tuesday’s ruling does not automatically mean the woman and her children will be granted asylum, though her lawyer told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he believes she will ultimately win.

“We are going to win, (but) it’s going to be a long time,” said Roy Petty, an Arkansas immigration lawyer who represented her in the case. He said the court backlog could delay a final decision for years longer.

Guatemala ranked third in the world for the murder of women, according to statistics cited by the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year. In a 2012 report on violence against women, the Pan American Health Organization said that from 2008 to 2009 more than one-quarter of Guatemalan women said they had at some point suffered physical or sexual violence from a spouse or partner.

The ruling technically affects only Guatemalan women, but Petty and other immigration advocates said the decision could open the door to asylum claims for women from other countries.

“The decision for this Guatemalan woman has clear implications for other Central American women, that’s for sure,” said Benjamin Casper, director of Center for New Americans at the University of Minnesota Law School. “This is the first binding decision … to recognize this social group of women.”

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Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

• Society & Culture
• Politics & Government
• Guatemala

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal immigration court system should be separated from the Justice Department and operated independently of federal law enforcement, the top two leaders of the immigration judges’ union said Wednesday.

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said immigration judges act as arbiters in deportation cases being argued by Homeland Security Department lawyers but judges also are treated as attorneys for the government.

As employees of DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, Marks said, the judges’ dual roles can potentially blur the lines for judges who are supposed to act as neutral arbiters in a complicated court system.

“Our goal is to serve as a neutral court, but paradoxically we are housed in a law enforcement agency,” Marks said.

And often, decisions about how the court is run are made beyond the court system.

Marks said an example of this is the recent decision by the Obama administration to have immigration courts start hearing cases of newly arrived immigrant children caught crossing the border alone before all other pending cases.

She said there is no other court system in which the government would be allowed to order a total overhaul of the docket, placing particular cases at the top. Marks, a judge in San Francisco, spoke Wednesday at the National Press Club with Denise Noonan Slavin, a Miami-based judge who is the union’s executive vice president.

In a statement, the DOJ agency said the immigration court system is designed to be handled within the Justice Department and separating it “would take significant resources.”

The type of civil administrative adjudications that EOIR conducts are designed to be handled within the structure of the Department and it would take significant resources to create an agency separate from an executive branch cabinet officer.

Beyond potential conflicts of interest, the judges said the DOJ agency and the court system have been underfunded for many years, which has contributed in part to the backlog of more than 375,000 pending cases.

Because of the backlog it can take several years for an immigration cases to be resolved.

Slavin said investing more money in the court system would solve many problems. Just under 2 percent of immigration enforcement spending goes toward immigration courts, Marks said.

And while creating a new, independent immigration court system might be costly initially, she said it would ultimately be more efficient.

“If your gas tank has a leak do you keep filling it up with gas or do you fix it first?” Slavin asked.

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Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

• Politics & Government
• Government
• Justice Department

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal immigration court system should be separated from the Justice Department and operated independently of federal law enforcement, the top two leaders of the immigration judges’ union said Wednesday.

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said immigration judges act as arbiters in deportation cases being argued by Homeland Security Department lawyers but judges also are treated as attorneys for the government.

As employees of DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, Marks said, the judges’ dual roles can potentially blur the lines for judges who are supposed to act as neutral arbiters in a complicated court system.

“Our goal is to serve as a neutral court, but paradoxically we are housed in a law enforcement agency,” Marks said.

And often, decisions about how the court is run are made beyond the court system.

Marks said an example of this is the recent decision by the Obama administration to have immigration courts start hearing cases of newly arrived immigrant children caught crossing the border alone before all other pending cases.

She said there is no other court system in which the government would be allowed to order a total overhaul of the docket, placing particular cases at the top. Marks, a judge in San Francisco, spoke Wednesday at the National Press Club with Denise Noonan Slavin, a Miami-based judge who is the union’s executive vice president.

In a statement, the DOJ agency said the immigration court system is designed to be handled within the Justice Department and separating it “would take significant resources.”

The type of civil administrative adjudications that EOIR conducts are designed to be handled within the structure of the Department and it would take significant resources to create an agency separate from an executive branch cabinet officer.

Beyond potential conflicts of interest, the judges said the DOJ agency and the court system have been underfunded for many years, which has contributed in part to the backlog of more than 375,000 pending cases.

Because of the backlog it can take several years for an immigration cases to be resolved.

Slavin said investing more money in the court system would solve many problems. Just under 2 percent of immigration enforcement spending goes toward immigration courts, Marks said.

And while creating a new, independent immigration court system might be costly initially, she said it would ultimately be more efficient.

“If your gas tank has a leak do you keep filling it up with gas or do you fix it first?” Slavin asked.

___

Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

• Politics & Government
• Government
• Justice Department

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Conservatives in the U.S. Congress who object to President Barack Obama’s immigration policies are threatening to tie a must-pass budget bill to the issue, making for a possible showdown in September and raising the specter of a government shutdown.

White House-Congress tensions rose on Wednesday when Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said the president’s upcoming decision on steps to possibly ease some immigration rules would not be affected by Republican tactics.

“The president is determined to act where House Republicans won’t,” Earnest said, citing support from the business community, religious leaders, labor unions and law enforcement. “It would be a real shame if Republicans were to engage in an effort to shut down the government over a commonsense solution (on immigration).”

When lawmakers return from their summer recess on Sept. 8, they hope to sprint to another long break beginning around Sept. 19. That gives them little time to agree on temporarily funding federal agencies on Oct. 1, the start of a new fiscal year.

One year ago, Congress faced a similar task. But Republican leaders’ plans for smooth passage of legislation disintegrated when Tea Party-backed lawmakers led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas insisted on using the spending bill to gut Obama’s landmark healthcare program known as Obamacare.

Federal agencies were shut down for 16 days because of a lack of funds, before a bruised Republican Party relented.

Now, with partisanship running high ahead of November’s congressional elections, infighting over the spending bill – known as the continuing resolution, or CR – could become even more acute.

In part, that is because Congress left for recess unable to cut a deal on Obama’s request for emergency funds, which he said were needed to deal with an influx of Central American children illegally entering the country.

A spokeswoman for the White House budget office said the administration urges Congress to act on that request. Since most Republicans are opposed, it could spark a battle over the bigger bill to keep the government operating.

That would be nothing compared to the fight Obama could touch off in September if he announces unilateral actions giving temporary legal status and work permits to millions of undocumented residents.

Such a move could prompt some Republicans to retaliate by holding up the government-funding bill unless it prohibits Obama from carrying out immigration policy changes – a step Senate Democrats likely would oppose.

“If the president wields his pen and commits that unconstitutional act to legalize millions, I think that becomes something that is nearly political nuclear,” the Des Moines Register newspaper in Iowa quoted Republican Representative Steve King saying at a meeting of conservative Republicans.

Obama has said he will use his executive powers at the end of summer because Republicans have blocked changes to an antiquated, unworkable U.S. immigration law.

According to one Senate Republican aide, “The focus is on doing everything … to force Senate consideration” of a bill passed by the Republican-controlled House on Aug. 1.

That measure would reverse Obama’s 2012 policy giving temporary legal status to some undocumented residents who were brought to the United States as children years ago by their parents. It would also stop Obama from expanding the policy, possibly to parents of those children.

“An area of focus is the CR,” said the aide, who added that several senators are ready to join the effort.

But with Republicans on the verge of a November election win that could see them expand their majority in the House and capture the Senate, the last thing party leaders and many rank-and-file members want is to raise the possibility of a government shutdown – something voters do not tolerate.

At the same time, Democrats, according to congressional aides, will have to calculate whether they could be damaged in November by a September fight over immigration.

If either side blinks, there could be swift passage of a bare-bones temporary spending bill, delaying the showdown until after the elections.

In an interview this week with the conservative news and opinion website Breitbart, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida backed using budget bills to roll back Obama’s immigration policies.

“There will have to be some sort of a budget vote or a continuing resolution vote, so I assume there will be some sort of a vote on this (immigration),” he said.

It’s an effort that could have the backing of the conservative group Heritage Action for America, where spokesman Dan Holler mulled the possibility of linking the urgently needed funding bill with language to stop Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

The immigration policy controversy, he said, is having “a freezing effect on what September looks like” in Washington.

(Additional reporting by Roberta Rampton and Julia Edwards; editing by Caren Bohan and Douglas Royalty)

• Politics & Government
• Government
• Barack Obama
• government shutdown

In the days when he supported comprehensive immigration reform, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the son of Cuban immigrants, seemed like the one person who might be able to repair the GOP’s damage to its brand with Hispanic voters.

But compassion for immigrants collided with reality when Rubio, a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, ran into a GOP base that remains adamantly opposed to immigration in general and easing the penalties on illegal immigration in particular.

Related: Romney’s Stock Continues to Rise in a Muddled GOP Field

Rubio has already disavowed the immigration compromise that he supported in the Senate last year. And this week he drifted even further to the right, giving interviews to right-wing media outlets in which he raised the specter of a government shutdown in the fall if President Obama takes unilateral action on the immigration front. He also suggested there will likely be no new legislation this year to deal with the immigration issue, including with the thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the border illegally.

Speaking to Breitbart.com in an interview published earlier this week, Rubio expressed concern that President Obama would unilaterally grant amnesty to an untold number of illegal immigrants currently in the country – and said this action could lead to another government shutdown battle.

“There will have to be some sort of a budget vote or a Continuing Resolution vote, so I assume there will be some sort of a vote on this,” Rubio said. “I’m interested to see what kinds of ideas my colleagues have about using funding mechanisms to address this issue.”

Related: Paul Ryan Stakes His Claim As GOP ‘Unifier’

In an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, Rubio also said the president isn’t likely to see any legislation dealing with immigration reform come out of Congress any time soon.

“The fundamental impediment to making progress on immigration is that people in this country – a large number of Americans and their elected representatives in Congress – do not believe that, no matter what you put in the law, they don’t believe the federal government will enforce it,” he said.

This leaves the Obama administration in a difficult position with regard to what both parties have described as a “crisis” on the southern border. If the president acts unilaterally, he risks another government shutdown fight. If he waits for congressional legislation – it is likely he’ll never see any.

Clearly, the Marco Rubio roaming around Washington these days is very different from the senator who, just last year, worked with conservatives’ favorite senatorial boogeyman, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), on comprehensive immigration reform.

Related: Why Obama Is the Most Polarizing President Ever

The change in Rubio’s attitude change was on full display during a Monday speech in South Carolina, when he was interrupted by protesters who called for relaxed immigration laws. As the Washington Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia pointed out, when confronted by a similar group two years ago, Rubio was magnanimous, asking the security guards to allow the young people to stay and listen to his speech.

On Monday, though, he responded initially with sarcasm – then followed up with a brief lecture, telling the protesters, “You’re doing harm to your own cause. You don’t have the right to illegally immigrate to the United States.”

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