WhatFinger


The imperial presidency.

Leaked DHS memo, Obama staff discuss how to get around court rulings and implement executive amnesty



We asked this question the other day: Since it doesn't look like the federal courts will give their imprimatur to Obama's executive amnesty gambit, will he respect the constitutional separation of powers and enforce the law, or will he defy both Congress and the federal courts and just do whatever the hell he wants? Looks like we have our answer: According to a leaked memo out of the Department of Homeland Security, the administration is discussing how, not whether, they will thumb their noses at a co-equal branch of government and continue refusing to enforce the law. How? Just write new regulations that make the enforcement of statutory law an option, one you will decidedly not exercise:
The agency’s proposed regulations would allow immigrants, including those in the U.S. illegally, to receive extended work permits if sponsored by an employer, even if the sponsorship is terminated or expired. The leaked memo states that a benefit of the proposed action would be to “authorize the presence of certain individuals who are not here lawfully and address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” The senators charged that such changes would “directly violate” a federal court injunction issued in February suspending Obama’s plan to shield roughly 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation through expansions to a program granting extended work permits. The executive program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), initially granted temporary two-year legal status to immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children and attended school in the country. In 2014, Obama issued an executive order extending the work permits to three years. He also established deportation protections for certain undocumented parents of already protected children.

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The Hill has details of the memo and the strategies it contains:
The internal memo reveals four options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADs only to those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration & Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought visa system. As mentioned, the first plan the memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one. A major positive to this option, the memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes, the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit anyone inside our borders to work. The anonymous DHS policymakers state that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor market tested” it has been “demonstrat[ed] that their future employment won’t adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers, the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”
You want to call this stunning, but is it really considering the history of this administration when it comes to balance-of-power issues with the other branches? Obama is absolutely convinced that he can and should do whatever he wants, and that any check on his power by the legislative and/or judicial branches are by definition illegitimate, meaning anything he does to circumvent them is justified because darn it, he tried to work with them but they just wouldn't cooperate. In other words, they wouldn't give him what he wants, and the only constitutional role he recognizes for them is to rubber stamp his policies, even if the policy in question is to blatantly refuse to enforce existing law. By the way, if you're wondering where we got to the point where the president can act like this and suffer no consequences, it's because the news media either refuse to tell the public what he's doing and why it's an abuse of power, so for the most part the public is unaware of what's happening and why it's a serious concern. They're all over General William Westmoreland's dinner schedule from 1969, but they don't care about this.


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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