From the Washington Times:
The Obama administration still hasn’t fully rescinded the 2,000 three-year amnesties it wrongly issued four months ago in violation of a court order, government lawyers recently admitted in court, spurring a stern response from the judge who said the matter must be cleaned up by the end of July — or else.
It’s the latest black eye for President Obama’s amnesty policy and the immigration agency charged with carrying it out. The agency bungled the rollout, issuing three-year amnesties even while assuring the judge it had stopped all action hours after a Feb. 16 injunction.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for overseeing the amnesty, said it’s trying to round up all of the permits, sending out two-year amnesties and pleading with the illegal immigrants to return the three-year cards.
But they are having trouble getting some of the lucky recipients to send them back.
“USCIS is carefully tracking the returns of the three-year EAD cards, and many have been returned within weeks,” the agency said in a statement to The Washington Times. “USCIS continues to take steps to collect the remaining three-year EAD cards.”
The agency didn’t answer specific questions about how many remain outstanding, nor about what methods will be used to claw back the ones that folks refuse to return.
The three-year deportation amnesty was part of Mr. Obama’s November 2014 announcement when he proposed granting a three-year tentative deportation amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. It was to be a massive expansion, in both eligibility and duration, of his 2012 amnesty, which granted two-year amnesty to so-called Dreamers.
Judge Andrew S. Hanen blocked the expansion in February, issuing an injunction that remains in place even as the administration appeals it to a higher court. The next hearing on that appeal is due July 10.
But Judge Hanen was shocked to learn that USCIS issued the 2,000 three-year amnesties even after he’d issued his injunction.
“I expect you to resolve the 2,000; I’m shocked that you haven’t,” Judge Hanen told the Justice Department at a hearing last week, according to the San Antonio Express-News. “If they’re not resolved by July 31, I’m going to have to figure out what action to take.”
Homeland Security says it’s changed the duration of the work permits from three years to two years in its computer systems, but getting the cards returned from the illegal immigrants themselves is tougher.
The office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the lawsuit challenging the amnesty and who won the February injunction against the policy, didn’t respond to a request for comment on the outstanding permits.
Josh Blackman, an assistant professor at the South Texas College of Law, who has filed briefs in the case opposing the Obama administration’s claims, said he believes the administration is trying to comply in good faith with Judge Hanen’s order, but USCIS’s difficulties show how difficult managing the full amnesty would be.
“The entire nature of this case was that agents were given a free rein to approve as many applications as possible. DHS can’t keep track of its own agents and who’s being approved for deferrals and work authorization,” he said.
Mr. Obama announced the policy in order to circumvent Congress, which is moving the other direction away from legalization and toward a crackdown on most illegal immigrants. Read much more here if you dare.
Don’t go away mad just yet….sure there is more and Jeh Johnson is quietly very busy.
Obama administration goes for integration over deportation for illegal immigrants
Washington Post:
The Obama administration has begun a profound shift in its enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, aiming to hasten the integration of long-term illegal immigrants into society rather than targeting them for deportation, according to documents and federal officials.
In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has taken steps to ensure that the majority of America’s 11.3 million undocumented immigrants can stay in this country, with agents narrowing enforcement efforts to three groups of illegal migrants: convicted criminals, terrorism threats or those who recently crossed the border.
While public attention has been focused on the court fight over President Obama’s highly publicized executive action on immigration, DHS has with little fanfare been training thousands of immigration agents nationwide to carry out new policies on everyday enforcement.
The legal battle centers on the constitutionality of a program that would officially shield up to 5 million eligible illegal immigrants from deportation, mainly parents of children who are U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. A federal judge put the program, known by the acronym DAPA, on hold in February after 26 states sued.
The new policies direct agents to focus on the three priority groups and leave virtually everyone else alone. Demographic data shows that the typical undocumented immigrant has lived in the United States for a decade or more and has established strong community ties.
While the new measures do not grant illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, their day-to-day lives could be changed in countless ways. Now, for instance, undocumented migrants say they are so afraid to interact with police, for fear of being deported, that they won’t report crimes and often limit their driving to avoid possible traffic stops. The new policies, if carried out on the ground, could dispel such fears, advocates for immigrants say.
Deportations, for example, are dropping. The Obama administration is on pace to remove 229,000 people from the country this year, a 27 percent fall from last year and nearly 50 percent less than the all-time high in 2012.
Fewer people are also in the pipeline for deportation. The number of occupied beds at immigration detention facilities, which house people arrested for immigration violations, have dropped nearly 20 percent this year.
And on Johnson’s orders, officials are reviewing the entire immigrant detainee population — and each of the 400,000 cases in the nation’s clogged immigration courts — to weed out those who don’t meet the new priorities. About 3,000 people have been released from custody or had their immigration cases dropped, DHS officials said. There is more found here.
Now you can channel your anger where it needs to go, the White House, the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security.
Don’t shoot the messenger. ;~)
