The Secretary of Homeland Security and the Counsel to the President directed the Justice Department to investigate whether the president had the authority to take contemplated actions with regard to illegal immigrants via executive order. In a letter dated 19 November, they found he did not. On 20 November, he did it anyway. The most interesting aspect of the legal advice President Barack Obama got on the immigration executive action he announced Thursday night may be what lawyers told the president he could not or should not do. A 33-page Justice Department legal opinion made public just hours before Obama spoke concluded that he doesn’t have the legal authority to offer broad deportation relief to parents of so-called Dreamers—people who came to the U.S. illegally as children and won a reprieve from deportation in a program known as DACA that Obama created in 2012. “As it has been described to us, the proposed deferred action program for parents of DACA recipients would not be a permissible exercise of enforcement discretion,” Justice Department attorney Karl Thompson wrote in the Office of Legal Counsel opinion. The opinion also reveals, in a footnote, that Justice Department lawyers informally raised concerns about Obama’s initial 2012 DACA program before it was enacted. Read more at MinutemenNews/2014/11/doj-found-obama-lacked-authority-take-action-took/
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 18:57:59 +0000
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