A deadlocked Supreme Court on Thursday delivered a blow to the White House by leaving in place a lower court ruling that halted President Obama’s executive action to grant legal status to an estimated four million illegal immigrants.
The justices split 4-4 in the case, called U.S. v. Texas, meaning that the appeals court ruling would stand as the final word. That effectively blocks what would have been one President Obama’s key domestic policy achievements and underscores the limits of the president’s policy of using executive action to bypass Congress entirely rather than attempt to cut deals.
For the immigrants in question, it means their legal status is unchanged and they remain subject to deportation.
A coalition of 26 attorneys general from mostly Republican-leaning states sued the administration over the 2014 policy, officially known as “Deferred Action for Parental Accountability” or “DAPA.” The attorneys general argued the president’s action was both unconstitutional and a financial burden on states. The White House argued the president was merely using his prosecutorial discretion.
Since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February, the court has had only eight members and as consequence has been unable to form a majority on some controversial cases. Thursday’s ruling on U.S. v. Texas was just a single sentence: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court.” That means that a judicial order halting DAPA by Texas federal Judge Andrew Hanen in February 2015 remains in place.
The case has been highly controversial, and within minutes of the court’s announcement, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said she would make it an issue in the 2016 race.
“Today’s deadlocked decision from the Supreme Court is unacceptable, and show us all just how high the stakes are in this election. As I have consistently said, I believe that President Obama acted well within his constitutional and legal authority,” she said in a statement emailed to reporters. “This decision is also a stark reminder of the harm Donald Trump would do to our families, our communities, and our country. Trump has pledged to repeal President Obama’s executive actions on his first day in office.”
Republicans cheered the announcement: “Today, Article I of the Constitution was vindicated. The Supreme Court’s ruling makes the president’s executive action on immigration null and void. The Constitution is clear: The president is not permitted to write laws — only Congress is. This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers,” said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.
Among the initial critics of the policy was President Obama himself. Pro-immigration advocates had pushed him throughout his first term to simply direct the Department of Homeland Security to allow people illegally living in the U.S. to stay. Obama resisted them, saying on 22 separate, public occasions that he lacked that authority.
“If this was an issue that I could do unilaterally I would have done it a long time ago,” he said in a 2013 Telemundo interview. “The way our system works is Congress has to pass legislation. I then get an opportunity to sign it and implement it.”
The following year, the president changed is mind and announced the DAPA policy, which expanded an existing policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that said people who came into the country illegally under the age of 16 would be eligible to request that the government defer any deportation. DAPA expanded that policy to include a DACA-eligible immigrant’s parents.
“The actions I’m taking are not only lawful, they’re the kinds of actions taken by every single Republican president and every single Democratic president for the past half century,” Obama said in a November 2014 address.
Obama’s critics argued that he was correct the first time and that such a policy change could be done only through Congress. The state attorneys general sued, arguing that the president was obligated to enforce the law and that by not doing so he was placing a financial burden on the states since it made the immigrants eligible for entitlements such as unemployment.
Hanen halted the policy on much narrower grounds, arguing that President Obama failed to abide by the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act, the law that covers federal rulemakings. The law requires the administration to publish any proposed rule changes and allow for public comment before enacting them, a step the administration skipped in the case.
The April oral arguments before the Supreme Court focused heavily on whether the states had legal standing to bring the case in the first place.
Chief Justice John Roberts called the Obama administration’s position “a real Catch-22” because it argued that any financial harm the states would suffer could be addressed by changing state laws on entitlement eligibility, but that those changes might not be legal either.
“You would sue them instantly. You would say people are being discriminated against,” Roberts told Solicitor General Donald Verilli.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s lone Latino member, disputed the contention by the attorneys general that only Congress could determine immigration policy. “Congress has chosen to remain silent,” she said.
