DACA Case Judge Has History of Ruling Against Deportation Relief

The Texas federal judge who ruled against a Biden administration rule to protect “Dreamers” has a history of wiping out executive programs intended to shield undocumented immigrants from deportation. Judge Andrew Hanen of the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas ruled the Biden administration’s version of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides work permits and deportation protection to nearly 600,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, was illegal. Hanen’s ruling on Wednesday preserves protections for current DACA recipients while litigation continues. His ruling was no surprise to immigrant advocates, given the George W. Bush-appointee’s record of ruling against attempts by Democratic administrations to enact deportation relief programs in the face of congressional stalemate on the issue. Hanen ruled in 2021 against the original version of DACA implemented during the Obama administration, following a legal challenge from Republican-led states. In this week’s decision, Hanen found the latest rule, which went through the formal regulatory process, is substantially similar to the Obama-era program and thus suffers from the same issues. And more than eight years ago, Hanen blocked the then-Obama administration from implementing a program that would have protected certain undocumented immigrant parents with US citizen children from being deported. That decision was left in place following a split 4-4 ruling at the US Supreme Court. “When it has come to the Obama-era programs intended to help young people and their families, the rulings have been pretty consistent,” said Denise Gilman, co-director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Victoria Neilson, a supervising attorney with the National Immigration Project, described Hanen’s latest decision on DACA as “obviously very disappointing, but definitely expected.” “It seems pretty clear from his record that he is not a judge who wants to expand rights for noncitizens, so it’s certainly in keeping with that philosophy,” Neilson said. Signaled Concern Hanen has served on Texas’ Southern District for just over two decades, after sailing through Senate confirmation in 2002 by a vote of 97-0. The Texas judge left his job in private practice in Houston to join the bench, sitting first in the Southern District’s Brownsville division, located in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley along the US-Mexico border. He spent over a decade in Brownsville, which has seen record levels of migration in recent years, before relocating back to Houston in 2018. Earlier in his judicial career, he notably presided over a series of eminent domain cases, after the Bush administration sued hundreds of private landowners, mostly in south Texas, who had refused to sell their land to the federal government for border wall construction. Gilman, who closely followed that litigation, said Hanen “had quite a measured approach to those cases.” But Hanen has also long signaled concern about immigration policies that aim to help migrant families. He warned in one opinion in a smuggling case that such family reunification policies could incentivize more human smuggling and lower morale among border agents. In a 10-page order in 2013 in the case of a woman convicted of smuggling a migrant child into the US at the request of the child’s mother, Hanen lamented that the parent who paid the smuggler was not arrested and that the child was eventually brought to her mother after being apprehended by agents at the border. This, Hanen wrote, amounted to the federal government “completing the criminal mission” of the parent who had hired the smuggler. Hanen also likened the government’s decision to reunite the mother and child in the US to the government “taking illegal drugs or weapons that it has seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation.” Still, Terence Garrett, a professor of political science at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley who specializes in immigration issues, described Hanen as a “pretty typical conservative Republican-appointed judge” who has grown frustrated with the refusal of Congress to pass meaningful updates to the US immigration system. “He’s trying to force the Congress to take action,” Garrett said. “In that sense, that’s also a small-c conservative bent at looking at the Constitution, so I think he’s been fairly consistent along those lines.” For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.