Judge Blocking Obama on Immigration Has Reputation for Fairness in Texas

New York Times

By Julia Preston

March 10, 2015

Judge Blocking Obama on Immigration Has Reputation for Fairness in Texas 

From his bench in a federal courthouse barely a mile from the Rio Grande, Judge Andrew S. Hanen looked over a procession of small-time drug dealers and thieves, each representing a lapse of border enforcement.

In a familiar routine for the judge, he handed out sentences at a hearing last week to convicted criminals who had been deported to Mexico and then sneaked back into the United States. For returning illegally, he sent them to prison for a year or so, and most likely to another deportation. Judge Hanen warned them that their time behind bars would be even longer if they ever came back again.

“I want to be sure you understand that,” he said, looking each man in the eye.

Judge Hanen is now in the middle of a much bigger legal fight, after his Feb. 16 ruling that temporarily halted President Obama’s executive actions to shield millions of unauthorized immigrants from deportation. Among officials from the 26 states bringing the lawsuit, the decision was hailed as a triumph of law over a reckless president. Mr. Obama said he was confident that the administration would eventually prevail.

Judge Hanen came to the Federal District Court here almost 13 years ago from a strait-laced law practice in Houston. His 123-page injunction against the executive actions was informed by a starkly negative view of the Obama administration’s border security efforts. He began to express that perspective after seeing the traffic through his courtroom in this borderland city, where migrants illegally cross every day despite a buildup of fences and agents, while bloody feuds rage among Mexican drug cartels just across the river.

“The court finds that the government’s failure to secure the border has exacerbated illegal immigration into this country,” Judge Hanen said in the February ruling. The states’ coffers were “being drained by the constant influx of illegal immigrants,” he wrote.

Advocates for immigrants who want to see the president’s initiatives go forward have portrayed Judge Hanen, 61, as a right-wing crank. But in Texas he is known as a conservative but fair-minded jurist with keen analytical intelligence — and a jovial sense of humor, even when he is in black robes.

“He is the complete package,” said David Kent, a lawyer in Dallas who was with Judge Hanen in Baylor University’s law school class of 1978; Judge Hanen graduated first in the class. “Absolutely as sharp as could be,” said Mr. Kent, who also clerked at the Texas Supreme Court with him, “and on the personal side so funny, so good-hearted.”

The Obama administration is seeking an emergency stay of Judge Hanen’s injunction. The judge on Monday declined to rule yet on that request, and administration officials said they would probably move their motion to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans this week. Judge Hanen still has to rule on the larger constitutional questions in the states’ challenge. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

Judge Hanen’s decisions gained new importance to Republicans in Congress who are determined to stop the president’s actions, after they failed last week to eliminate funding for the initiatives in the Homeland Security spending bill. Republicans are now looking to the courts to keep Mr. Obama’s programs from taking effect.

Before moving to Brownsville in 2002, Judge Hanen had a comfortable law practice, serving at one time as president of the bar association in Houston. But friends said his upbringing was modest. John Eddie Williams Jr., a high-profile trial lawyer in Houston and another Baylor classmate, said Mr. Hanen had been raised in a bare-bones household in Waco by a single mother.

“In law school, he would wear jeans with holes at the knees, and not because it was fashionable,” Mr. Williams said.

He recalled that the two of them had been in a study group with a classmate named Priscilla Owen. Mr. Hanen was always looking to lighten the studious mood with jokes. Without telling Ms. Owen, he once enrolled her in a Cotton Queen beauty pageant, Mr. Williams said. She was startled to receive several mailings asking for information about her physical endowments, before Mr. Hanen disclosed his prank.

Today Ms. Owen is a federal appeals judge for the Fifth Circuit, the court that will hear the administration’s appeals of Judge Hanen’s decisions in the states’ lawsuit.

Mr. Williams said he differed with Judge Hanen on immigration, supporting Mr. Obama “100 percent.” But he said, “I would disagree with anyone who would say Andy Hanen has any prejudice. His decisions will always be based on sound legal grounds.”

Judge Hanen is one of the few judges ever to be nominated twice to the same court by two presidents: by the first President George Bush in 1992, a nomination never voted on by the Senate, and by President George W. Bush in 2002.

During his years in Brownsville, Judge Hanen has sent a corrupt judge to prison and slogged through dozens of lawsuits over the federal government’s seizure of land to build border fences, leaving his courtroom to visit the boundary so he could see the disputed properties for himself.

But in recent years, Judge Hanen has raised increasingly vivid alarms about what he sees as a porous border and lax enforcement. In December 2013, after sentencing a migrant smuggler, he issued a broadside when he learned that the authorities had delivered a child, the smuggler’s cargo, to the child’s mother, an unauthorized immigrant in Virginia. Judge Hanen accused the administration of “successfully completing the mission of the criminal conspiracy.”

In August, he held forth when a gang member from El Salvador whom he had previously sent to prison turned up in California after deportation and was granted a form of asylum. The administration, he said, “has pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it into the streets of Los Angeles, with the faint hope it will not go off.”

Judge Hanen supplemented that opinion with charts of the leadership of Mexican drug cartels. “Rewarding gang or cartel members for their own antisocial activities endangers everyone in the United States,” he wrote.

Mr. Obama has suggested that officials in Texas, which is leading the states’ lawsuit, shopped for a sympathetic judge before filing in the Southern District of Texas in Brownsville. In this court, there is no one other than Judge Hanen in a position to hear the case.

Speaking at a town-hall-style meeting in Miami last month, Mr. Obama said he was not surprised by the injunction. “We saw the judge who was rendering the opinion,” the president said.

Michael A. Olivas, a law professor at the University of Houston, said the move by Texas officials was fair play. But he said Judge Hanen was often out of line with his rebukes of Mr. Obama’s policies. “He goes further than he needs to, with intemperate, nonjudicious and nongermane elaborations,” he said.

In South Texas, some leaders said the judge was just responding to the conditions around him.

“That gentleman is constantly hearing the prosecution of drug cartel violence in his courtroom,” said State Representative Eddie Lucio III, a Mexican-American Democrat who lives in Brownsville. “When he says we need to have proper border enforcement, it’s because he sees the worst of it.”

But Brownsville’s mayor, Tony Martinez, also a Democrat, said Judge Hanen had overlooked another side of immigration. It was on full display last month, the mayor said, just around the corner from the courthouse, as the city held its annual festival known as Charro Days, celebrating the unity of cultures straddling the border. Mr. Martinez and Mr. Lucio joined the parade down the main street, dressed in their Mexican cowboy finest.

Mr. Martinez filed papers to the court supporting Mr. Obama’s actions, saying they would improve enforcement by focusing agents on deporting criminals, not peaceable workers.

“We may be two countries,” the mayor said, “but on the border we’re one family.”

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com