Federal judge halts Obama's immigration action

(Image credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

published 17 February 2015

A federal judge ordered a halt to President Obama's executive actions on immigration on Monday, stopping the administration from implementing programs that would grant work permits for up to five million undocumented immigrants and offer protection from deportation. The first program was to start accepting applications this Wednesday.

Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville sided with Texas and 25 other states who filed a lawsuit, saying the "executive measures were an egregious case of government by fiat" and would make a substantial impact on their budgets, The New York Times reports. Hanen, a vocal critic of Obama's immigration policy, said that the administration did not comply with basic administrative procedures for putting the initiative into effect.

The policy has support from 12 states, the District of Columbia, and the Conference of Mayors. Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard, told the Times he believes Hanen's order will be suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. "Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress," he said. "They don't have any right of their own."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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