(The Hill) – A newly leaked internal
DHS memorandum produced for an off-the-record agency conclave reveals that the
Obama administration is actively planning to circumvent a federal court
injunction that suspended part of last November’s deferral-based amnesty
initiative.
The document, apparently
prepared as follow-up from a DHS “Regulations Retreat” last summer, appears
sure to re-ignite concerns in Congress as well as federal judges in the Fifth
Circuit. The Administration has already been criticized from the bench for
handing out work permits to hundreds of thousands of deferred action
beneficiaries, in direct violation of a district court’s order. With the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals deciding any day now whether to deny the
Administration’s request to reverse that injunction, this public leak has come
at a critical juncture for U.S. enforcement policy.
Last June, four months after Texas
federal judge Andrew Hanen’s order to freeze President’s DAPA and Expanded DACA
programs—disclosure: the Immigration Reform Law Institute has filed
briefs in these cases—DHS’s immigration policy makers apparently held a
“Regulations Retreat” to discuss “different options” for “open market
Employment Authorization Document (EAD) regulatory changes.” EAD is the statutory
term for work permits. From a memo recording these discussions, we now know
that the Obama DHS has, rather than pausing to allow the courts to assess the
constitutionality of its enforcement nullification initiatives, been gearing up
to roll out one or more of four plans drawn up at the meeting, each one
designed to provide EADs to millions of nonimmigrants, including those lawfully
present and visa overstayers, crippling the actual employment-based visa system
on the federal statute-book.
The internal memo reveals four
options of varying expansiveness, with option 1 providing EADs to “all
individuals living in the United States”, including illegal aliens,
visa-overstayers, and H-1B guest-workers, while option 4 provides EADs only to
those on certain unexpired non-immigrant visas. Giving EADs to any of the
covered individuals, however, is in direct violation of Congress’s Immigration
& Nationality Act and works to dramatically subvert our carefully wrought
visa system.
As mentioned, the first plan the
memo discusses basically entails giving EADs to anyone physically present in
the country who until now has been prohibited from getting one.
A major positive to this option, the
memo reads, is that it would “address the needs of some of the intended deferred
action population.” Although DHS doesn’t say it expressly, included here would
be those 4.3 million people covered by the president’s DAPA and Expanded DACA
programs whose benefits were supposed to have been halted in the Hanen
decision. On top of working around the Hanen injunction, this DHS plan would
also dole out unrestricted EADs to those on temporary non-immigrant visas, such
as H-1B-holders (their work authorizations being tied to their employers) and
another 5 to 6 million illegal aliens thus far not covered by any of
the President’s deferred action amnesty programs. By claiming absolute
authority to grant work authorization to any alien, regardless of status, DHS
is in effect claiming it can unilaterally de-couple the 1986 IRCA work authorization
statutes from the main body of U.S. visa law. While DHS must still observe
the statutory requirements for issuing visas, the emerging doctrine concedes,
the administration now claims unprecedented discretionary power to permit
anyone inside our borders to work.
The anonymous DHS policymakers state
that a positive for this option is that it “could cover a greater number of
individuals.” In a strikingly conclusory bit of bureaucratese, they state that
because illegal aliens working in the country “have already had the US labor
market tested” it has been “demonstrated that their future employment won’t
adversely affect US workers.” The labor market, in other words, has already
been stress-tested through decades of foreign-labor dumping and the American
working-class, which disproportionately includes minorities, working mothers,
the elderly, and students, is doing just fine. Apparently, the fact
that 66 million Americans and legal aliens are currently unemployed
or out of the job-market was not a discussion point at the DHS “Retreat.”
Bottom line: The memo foreshadows
more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million
illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws)
that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016. According to the
authors, one negative factor for granting EADs to illegal aliens,
visa-overstayers, etc., is that they’ll still “face difficulties in pursuing
permanent residence due to ineligibility or being subject to unlawful presence
inadmissibility for which a waiver is required.” This is in reference to the
reality that an EAD isn’t a green card and that eventually the
EAD-beneficiaries are supposed to apply to ‘adjust their status,’ which cannot
be done without showing evidence of lawful status. But this might change, they
write. The DHS “macro-level policy goal”, we’re told, is to assist individuals
to stay “until they are ready and able to become immigrants.” This would seem
to say that DHS, the largest federal law enforcement agency in the nation, is
banking on awarding those who’ve broken our laws and violated our national
sovereignty.
Will the 26 plaintiff states that
have challenged the President’s DAPA program bring this memo to the Fifth
Circuit’s attention, before they issue their closely-awaited decision? If
this document is indeed the cutting edge of Obama’s strategy for DHS to
circumvent Judge Hanen’s injunction order, it would confirm the
Administration’s bad faith and contempt both for the court and the law.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/the-administration /258689-leaked-dhs-memo-shows-obama-might-circumvent-dapa
http://www.teaparty.org/leaked-memo-obama-secretly-plotting-to-defy-court-on-amnesty-127748/
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