The Office of Legal Counsel to the President last night released a legal opinion that lays out the legal authority and precedents for President Obama’s executive orders on the use of prosecutorial discretion to defer deportations. The Department of Homeland Security’s Authority to Prioritize Removal of Certain Aliens Unlawfully Present in the United States and to Defer Removal of Others (.pdf).
Moreover, a group of leading legal scholars has written a letter declaring Obama’s action is well within his legal authority to exercise broad discretion over how to employ the nation’s enforcement machinery. Legal Scholars: Obama’s Immigration Actions Lawful:
President Barack Obama’s announced immigration executive actions are lawful, a group of ten prominent legal scholars wrote in a Joint Letter (Scribd) shared by the White House with TIME.
Pushing back on Republicans who have blasted Obama’s action as unconstitutional and unlawful, the signatories include Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe, conservative legal scholar Eric Posner, and former Yale Law School Dean and former State Department Legal Advisor Harold Hongju Koh.
“While we differ among ourselves on many issues relating to Presidential power and immigration policy, we are all of the view that these actions are lawful,” the professors wrote. “They are exercises of prosecutorial discretion that are consistent with governing law and with the policies that Congress has expressed in the statutes that it has enacted.”
The letter reinforces a Justice Department opinion that the president’s actions were lawful.
So to all the demagogues of the conservative media entertainment complex and idiot Tea-Publicans in Congress, and elsewhere, who say this action is “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” and Tea-Publicans “should sue” or “impeach” the president, STFU. I am sick and tired of your uninformed wilful ignorance and demagoguery.
And that goes double for Arizona’s publicity whore, Crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio. Joe Arpaio files lawsuit against Obama over immigration.
UPDATE: U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow told attorneys for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio he is inclined to cite the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for contempt of court and to issue a court order for new investigations into how it treated Latinos and the degree to which the county’s lawmen buried evidence of it. Judge warns Arpaio with contempt, more investigation:
Judge Snow had clearly reached his limit on Thursday.
He told attorneys he will issue an order telling MCSO to spell out what it plans to continue investigating internally. Anything else, he said, could be investigated by himself or by the court-appointed monitor, Snow signaled. He plans to hold a hearing on Dec. 4 into the proposed order and to call deputies as witnesses as part of his own independent inquiries, he said.
“I have given your client opportunity after opportunity after opportunity,” Snow said. “In opportunity after opportunity after opportunity, your client has violated the law, violated my express orders or subverted the investigation I ordered.”
Snow said he had the right, and maybe the inclination, to cite MCSO with civil or criminal contempt of court.
“I am not going to be tolerant any more,” he warned.
Crazy Uncle Joe Arpaio’s latest publicity stunt should be the last straw for Judge Snow.
The dreamers parents need to be deferred also and all need to be amnestied. The activists should protest and demonstrate at all republican presidential candidate events. Also demonstrate at any other republican event make them pay for no amnesty legislation. Put large demonstrations in the street remember in 2006 when a march up 24th street shut down the whole east side of phoenix. No amnesty justice No peace.