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ICYMI: Seattle Times Editorial Calls on Supreme Court to Uphold Immigration Executive Action Policies

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On April 18th, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the US v Texas case to decide the fate of the expanded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA+) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA) policies, which are currently blocked from implementation by a politically-motivated lawsuit.

new editorial in the Seattle Times, pasted below, makes the case for why the Supreme Court should uphold the immigration executive actions:

The national debate over immigration reform keeps moving further from reason and now borders on the absurd.

The best hope for a course correction is the U.S. Supreme Court.

On April 18, the justices will hear oral arguments in a lawsuit filed by 26 states seeking to overturn President Obama’s 2014 executive orders deferring deportations of certain immigrants — parents of lawful citizens and people brought to the U.S. before the age of 16. The court should uphold Obama’s pragmatic decision. He acted after years of interminable congressional stalling. Immigration advocates had nicknamed him “deporter-in-chief” because of his administration’s record number of deportations compared to his predecessors.

Now the national conversation is poisoned by the reckless rhetoric of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, who boasts of mass deportation and making Mexico pay for a wall along the U.S. border.

About 11 million people are in the United States illegally, living and working throughout the country. They fit every profile, from farmworkers to college graduates to tech entrepreneurs.

Congress should enact comprehensive immigration reform that offers non-criminals a path toward citizenship. Two years ago, Washington’s U.S. Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell helped pass a bipartisan bill to do just that. That effort stalled when the House leadership refused to schedule a vote.

In a bit of theater last week, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., introduced a resolution to submit an amicus brief from the full chamber to the Supreme Court opposing the president’s deferred-action order. It passed the House 234-186, a split vote that should not be construed as speaking for the whole chamber.

Washington’s 10-member congressional delegation split along party lines Thursday, with Republican U.S. Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Dan Newhouse and Dave Reichert siding with their party leaders.

Fine. They got their partisan resolution.

They should also demand a vote for real immigration reform.

Read David Leopold’s recent analysis published at Medium for additional thoughts on why United States v. Texas is best viewed as an epic political battle.