Lyle Denniston, our Supreme Court correspondent, look at a lawsuit that claims a federal judge’s ban on President Obama’s immigration policies shouldn’t apply nationwide.
THE STATEMENT AT ISSUE:
“Martin Jonathan Batalla Vidal is not and has never been a party to the Texas v. United States suit. He did not have a full and fair opportunity to defend his interests in that action, and no other party there adequately represented them….The District Court in Texas v. United States lacked jurisdiction or authority to enter an injunction reaching to New York….The government’s reliance on the unlawfully broad Texas v. United States injunction was legally erroneous.
– Excerpt from a lawsuit filed on August 25 in a federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., by a 25-year-old undocumented immigrant, seeking to restore his expanded eligibility to work in the United States. He is challenging a decision by federal officials to withdraw his added work opportunity in order to obey a Texas judge’s nationwide order blocking enforcement of the Obama administration’s immigration policy.
WE CHECKED ON THE CONSTITUTION, AND…
The Constitution, in granting powers to courts at the federal level, specified that those courts only have the authority that Congress granted to them explicitly. That tends to limit the reach of an individual trial judge or appeals court. However, federal law makes clear that trial judges have broad authority, when they conclude that a government policy is likely to be ruled illegal, to issue orders to put that policy on hold until its legality can be fully tested at a trial. Those orders are supposed to be no broader than necessary to remedy the harm done by the challenged policy.
When a federal judge in Texas early last year decided that the Obama administration would lose a court challenge to its sweeping policy to defer deportation of upwards of four million undocumented immigrants, the judge ordered that policy stopped all across the nation. He rejected the government’s request to make such an order more limited in its impact.
That order has kept the policy on hold for a year and a half, and the order remains intact because the Supreme Court in late June upheld it by a tie vote, 4-to-4. That did not mean that the Justices agreed that the order was valid, just that they could not raise a majority to set it aside; that would have taken five votes on the eight-Justice court.
The Obama policy not only would have put off the deportation for up to three years and allowed work permits for adults who were undocumented, but it also expanded an earlier delayed deportation and work permit order for as many as 50,000 young immigrants who had come to the U.S. as children, and remained. Those young people have come to be known popularly as “the Dreamers,” because they were said to have been given the opportunity to experience the dream of growing up in America, coming out of the shadows of illegality.
Under the Obama policy, those youths qualified for a third year of work authorization, compared to two years under an earlier policy that was not involved in the case that went before the Texas federal judge. The judge’s nationwide order also put on hold those youths’ access to that third year of eligibility to hold jobs.
Last week, one of those young people, who had come to the U.S. from Mexico at age seven, had grown up in New York and was going to medical technician school, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Brooklyn. Now 25 and working in a sports club to earn his way to pay for medical training, he had gained that third year of eligibility, but federal officials took that away from him based on the nationwide order against enforcement.
Martin Jonathan Batalla Vidal, represented by lawyers expert in immigration law, asked the federal judge in New York to rule that the loss of his third year of eligibility was illegal. The nationwide reach of the Texas order was far broader than it needed to be, the lawsuit contended.
None of the “Dreamers” who would be affected by the Texas order had taken part in the case in the Texas federal court, and no one who was involved could speak for them or defend their interests, the lawsuit argued. This was not a request for the judge in New York to overturn the Texas order’s nationwide effect; rather, it was a request that federal officials be told that they should not have treated the order’s sweep as valid.
The state government in New York, the lawsuit noted, had joined with other states in filing a brief in the Texas case in support of the Obama policy, and arguing that the order should not have reached beyond Texas, because that was the only state that the judge had ruled would be harmed by the policy.
A group of 26 other states had filed the challenge to the Obama policy in the Texas federal court, and they had explicitly urged that the ban on enforcement be nationwide. The judge agreed, concluding that his jurisdiction was as wide as it needed to be to stop the policy. Since he had concluded that the policy would not withstand the 26 states’ legal challenge, he said it was proper to stop the federal government from implementing the policy elsewhere, even beyond the 26 states that had sued.
In May of last year, Batalla Vidal got a letter from federal officials, telling him to return the third-year work permit that he had been given. The only reason given was the Texas judge’s order. He later got a second letter, with a new renewal of his two-year work permit.
Without the option of that third year, his lawsuit noted, he will now have to apply for another renewal earlier than planned. His lawyers also noted that he has to pay $465 for each request for a renewal, and they argued that the renewal process takes time, and he might have to leave his current job while that process goes forward.
All of this, the lawsuit contended, is the result of a lawsuit in Texas, where he does not live and has no plans to make his home, and where no one represented him and the thousands of other “Dreamers” adversely affected by the breadth of the judge’s order.
Because his lawsuit is aimed specifically at federal immigration officials who took away his third-year work card, the federal government will have a chance to respond to it before it proceeds further.
Legendary journalist Lyle Denniston is Constitution Daily’s Supreme Court correspondent. Denniston has written for us as a contributor since June 2011. Denniston has covered the Supreme Court since 1958. His work also appears on lyldenlawnews.com.
