executive action

Executive action by President Barack Obama is giving more relief to immigrants living illegally in the United States, including stopping deportations that take undocumented parents away from their American-born kids. But the downside to the plan is that families with parents back home or older children living in their home countries can't be reunited except for "brief emergency trips," The Washington Post's Pamela Constable reports: "Now, hundreds of thousands of undocumented families who left children or parents behind are in a special bind. They may still be tempted to arrange illegal cross-border visits, but they have more to lose now if they get caught, because it would jeopardize their new legal status and their ability to support the children they have here."

Undocumented immigrants can only leave the country if they apply for an emergency travel document called "advanced parole," but the applications often are denied at the full discretion of immigration officials, Constable further reports. The definition for "humanitarian" travel includes family funerals, but not family reunions.

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin and Jerry Markon report that the reason parents of "dreamer" children, who had been brought into the country illegally and had been granted temporary relief under the president’s 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, weren't included in President Obama's executive action protecting many immigrants from deportation is because " lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the White House examined the legal arguments and decided against it." The reasons the governmental lawyers gave for not including parents of "dreamers" were: "First, even though DACA recipients are not being deported at the moment, 'they unquestionably lack lawful status in the United States.' Second, doing so 'would represent a significant departure from deferred action programs that Congress has implicitly approved in the past.'"

Law professor Ingrid Wuerth, writing in Lawfare, says that the U.S. Supreme Court showed in its recent ruling in Bond v. United States that Chief Justice Roberts' court  is showing less deference to the executive branch in interpreting foreign relations matters.

At issue was a woman's conviction under an international chemical-weapons treaty when she put an arsenic-based poison on the mailbox of her husband's lover. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the defendant was improperly convicted under the Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act. 

"In making that determination in Bond, the Court afforded no deference to the government’s interpretation of the implementing legislation. Indeed, in Bond the Court’s rejection of the government’s interpretation of the statute was strained, as Justice Scalia argued in his concurring opinion," Wuerth said.

The New York Times' Adam Liptak writes that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Monday on the ability for President Obama's administration to take executive-only action on climate change. The justices will decide if the executive branch went too far in regulating greenhouse gas emissions from stationary sources like power plants. The issue taken up by the court, Liptak reports, is whether the Environmental Protection Agency "'permissibly determined that its regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from new motor vehicles triggered permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act for stationary sources that emit greenhouses gases.'” 

Reuters reports on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder's announcement this weekend that the Justice Department is going to expand LGBT rights. This includes recognizing the right of same-sex spouses not to testify against each other, to visit each other in federal prison, in how some debts are handled in federal bankruptcy proceedings and in eligibility for death benefits for survivors of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

Legislation to ban employment discrimination against LGBT Americans is stalled in Congress. But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has cleared the way for President Barack Obama to protect LGBT federal contractors through executive action, Huffington Post reports. While backers of the legislation would prefer for the legislation to pass, they also would like to see the president protect as many people as possible as his authority allows for. "Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) noted that Obama taking executive action on the issue would be in line with his recent promise to be more aggressive using his own authority where Congress is deadlocked," The Post further reports.

Immigration reform is another victim of the lack of bipartisan legislative action in Congress, and immigration-reform proponents have been pushing for President Obama to halt the 1,000 or so deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants taking place every day in case Congress does not enact immigration reforms. But the Washington Post reports the president says unilateral action on the deportatons is not possible. The Post also reported "House Republicans have refused to vote on a Senate-approved plan that features a 13-year path to citizenship for the undocumented, choosing instead to focus on piecemeal bills dealing with increased border security and workplace visas."