Stephen Legomsky Explains the Profound Consequences of the Anti-DAPA/DACA+ Lawsuit & Why SCOTUS Should Reject TX’s “Radical Theory of Standing”
In the wake of this week’s momentous decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the Texas-led lawsuit blocking the President’s DAPA and expanded DACA programs, Stephen Legomsky, Professor Emeritus at Washington University and former Chief Counsel of USCIS, offers a poignant explainer in the Huffington Post, clarifying what’s at stake in the case and how Texas has made a mockery of the issue of standing.
The full piece, “Supreme Court Immigration Case Will Have Profound Impact,” is available at the Huffington Posthere. We’ve included some of the key excerpts below:
On the history of deferred action and its decades-old application in the U.S.:
“In continuous use for more than four decades, deferred action is a case-by-case, temporary reprieve from removal, revocable at any time and for any reason. Under similarly decades-old statutes and regulations, one who receives deferred action may apply for a temporary work permit.”
On the fact that Texas is exploiting the state’s decision to provide licenses as an excuse to sue:
“There are many flaws in this argument. The biggest is that no one is forcing Texas to issue driver’s licenses to deferred action recipients; that is the state’s choice. So Texas has to argue in effect that just being forced to choose between incurring costs and changing its policy is enough to give it standing — even if the policy change is one that it actually prefers.
“No court has ever gone to that extreme, and for good reason.”
On how plaintiffs forum-shopped for conservative courts and judges, and why the Supreme Court needs to make sure they don’t get away with this:
“By suing in Brownsville, Texas’s lawyers knew they were likely to land Judge Andrew Hanen, whose earlier vitriolic condemnations of President Obama’s immigration enforcement policies made him an inviting decision-maker. They also knew that the inevitable appeal would have to be filed with the Fifth Circuit, the nation’s most politically conservative federal appeals court…
On the stakes of this case—that go far beyond the issue of immigration:
“…Accepting Texas’s radical theory of standing would be a recipe for paralysis. No one state should be empowered to thwart the federal government’s nationwide policy decisions so easily.”