U.S. President Barack Obama during a meeting at the White House in Washington on Jan. 19.JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Wednesday to rule on whether President Barack Obama violated the Constitution by offering millions of illegally resident aliens quasi-legal status.
The landmark case, to be decided in June, might have a major impact on the outcome of this year's presidential election and decide the fate of millions of Hispanic families currently living on the margins of American society.
Mr. Obama – claiming Congress had failed to act – offered more than four million mostly Hispanic unlawfully resident aliens work visas and promised that they would not be deported if they came out of the shadows and identified themselves to federal authorities.
The presidential fiat, an executive order issued in November, 2014, created a furor with critics – mostly Republicans – who maintained that Mr. Obama had overreached, that the president's role is to enforce the law, not to write new ones irrespective of whether or not Congress had acted.
"I'm going to use all of the authority that I have as the Chief Executive of the United States, as well as Commander-in-Chief, to try to make sure that we are prioritizing our immigration system a lot smarter than we've been doing," Mr. Obama said, defending his resort to executive order.
Unlawfully resident aliens who are the parents of U.S.-born citizens were eligible under the President's Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) scheme to get work papers and a renewable two-year promise that they would not be deported.
It followed an earlier plan, aimed at nearly one million young adults who had been brought to the United States illegally as children. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy also offered work papers, access to some benefits and a promise not to be deported if they identified themselves to federal authorities. Hundreds of thousands did.
Critics accused Mr. Obama of issuing what amounted to amnesty while advocates of comprehensive immigration reform voiced concern that his executive orders could be erased by the next president, leaving those who had answered his call to "come out of the shadows" easily traceable by federal agents and thus even more vulnerable to deportation.
Texas and 25 other states challenged DAPA and a federal district court judge in Brownsville, Tex., ordered the program halted in February, 2015. That ruling was upheld last November by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Obama administration appealed again to the Supreme Court. The nine justices will hear the case in April and rule in June.
A ruling backing Mr. Obama's far-reaching immigration orders would represent the second time the Supreme Court has saved one of the President's controversial achievements. His health-care scheme – widely called Obamacare – which included an obligation that all adults must buy coverage if they did not already have health insurance, has twice been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court.
But unlike with Obamacare, which was passed by Congress when Democrats controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Mr. Obama acted by executive order on immigration.
"President Obama's executive action is an affront to our system of republican self-government," Senator Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, said on Tuesday. "President Obama has attempted to bypass the constitutionally ordained legislative process and rewrite the law unilaterally."
The Supreme Court said it would consider separately whether Mr. Obama's direction to the Homeland Security and Justice departments not to deport the millions of DACA- and DAPA-eligible individuals violated the Constitution's requirement that the president "take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
Texas Attorney-General Ken Paxton, a Republican, said he hopes that the Supreme Court would "affirm what President Obama said himself on more than 20 occasions: that he cannot unilaterally rewrite congressional laws and circumvent the people's representatives."
Immigration has already emerged as among the most emotive of election issues this year with Republican presidential hopefuls vying to appear the toughest. Donald Trump, the New York billionaire, has vowed to build a wall along the Mexican border, force Mexico to pay for it and deport all the estimated 12 million aliens unlawfully inside the United States.
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton has said she will go beyond Mr. Obama's executive orders to deliver a pathway to permanent lawful residency, although she avoids the politically charged term amnesty.
Hispanics, estimated to number 55 million and now the largest minority in the United States, may determine the outcome of the presidential race. Many analysts predict that if Republicans can attract 40 per cent or more of the Hispanic vote – the level of support George W. Bush achieved in 2004 – they will win the White House. But if Democrats can hold the 71 per cent of the Hispanic vote won by Mr. Obama in 2012, they will win the presidency.
Either way, a Supreme Court ruling in June just before the parties' nominating conventions and only months before Americans vote in November will intensify the bitter debate over immigration and whether the millions already illegally inside the United States should be rounded up and forced out or given a pathway to lawful residency.