Huffington Post (Op-Ed)
By Ryan Campbell
May 28, 2015
Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA), much like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), is a patchwork program created as a Band
Aid to help alleviate
some of the problems of our broken immigration system. This includes
putting heads of families into corporately-owned prisons until
deportation over a traffic ticket, subsequently placing their US Citizen
children into foster care. This is the sort of thing
that organizers will remember well into 2016, and has the GOP's
fingerprints all over it.
Recently,
the 5th Circuit Appeals court ruled against a stay lifting the
preliminary injunction pressed by Governors in 26 states, all but two
Republicans. The states
sued to overturn DAPA, which was announced by the President back in
November, requesting a preliminary injunction on the program. A
preliminary injunction is a temporary measure issued to prevent a party
from doing something that would cause an irreparable
harm.
The
Plaintiff states argued that, once the program was implemented, it
would be impossible to un-implement because they would not be able to
strip millions of people of
immigration status. The court found this convincing and issued the
injunction, preventing the program from granting temporary status. This
was then appealed by the Administration, which asked for a stay of the
preliminary injunction to allow DAPA to be implemented.
Unfortunately, the appeal failed, and the injunction remains.
The
circuit court that ruled on the stay found "Because the government is
unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal of the injunction, we
deny the motion for stay
and request to narrow the scope of the injunction," voting 2-1.
Although
this is a huge setback for the immigrant rights community, it was a
very foreseeable one: the Governors who pressed the lawsuit looked all
over the country for
not only the most plaintiff-friendly judge to bring the case to, but
also a district court that would appeal to an appeals court like the
relatively conservative 5th Circuit. This is known as "forum shopping"
and, with 26 states bringing the suit, they had
over half of the country to bring choose from.
Although
the reaction has been much stronger with 26 states suing, the content
of DACA and expanding DACA is not that drastically different from the
original DACA program,
just on a much larger scale. Last time, although the GOP made a lot of
noise about how this was not the right way to do it, they mostly went
along. This was during the 2012 campaign of "self-deportation;"
surprisingly, things have only gotten worse.
Casting
a broader net will inevitably find a few more rotten apples that will
doubtlessly be featured over and over again as typical examples by Fox
News, but the criteria
is still a pretty sympathetic demographic: the parents of US Citizens
and legal permanent residents. This would allow families that have
already been quietly living and working within the United States to do
so without the constant fear of deportation breaking
them all up.
There
is always someone willing to try to end birthright citizenship, but it
never happens, and my money would be put on it never happening within
any of our lifetimes.
With our system so thoroughly broken, there are millions of US Citizens
who have spent their entire lives in the US that could still have their
parents put in prison and then deported if they got caught in a random
road stop by the wrong police officer. Their
experience up until then is much the same as any other first generation
immigrant.
Considering
our politics are bad enough that far-right Republicans defeated a
measure to allow those already in the country with status, DACA recipients, from being able
to serve in the military, I don't think our immigration system is
changing any time soon legislatively: that was literally the least they
could do and they could have done it entirely for the military without
considering immigration, especially since military
leadership supported it. This was still a step too far in the direction
of "amnesty" for a GOP caucus inexplicably led by Steve King (R-IA),
perhaps the country's least-respected member of Congress.
These
issues aren't going anywhere: Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) still does
not have the courage to watch his party potentially have a meltdown over
immigration if it were
ever put to a vote in the House, so I don't expect a solution from
Congress any time soon. For the near future, all we're looking at is
temporary fixes from the Executive Branch in the form of agency rules
for ICE and the Border Patrol, as well as executive
orders: that's where the ugly fights will be, and this is what
advocates will look to when judging who to support
for 2016.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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