On Thursday, the nation’s highest court declined to authorize the deportation-relief programs that had been proposed by President Barack Obama as a way around a years-long stalemate over immigration reform in Congress.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Perez-Reyes, who arrived from El Salvador 11 years ago and has two U.S.-born children, said in Spanish. “We came here out of necessity to give our families better lives. Will I be able to stay in this country?”
The 4-4 Supreme Court vote continues an injunction that started 16 months ago against the implementation Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program and an expanded version of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The court’s liberals and conservatives deadlocked, leaving in place a lower court’s decision that the president exceeded his powers in issuing the directive.
Thursday’s action – with six months left in Obama’s term and amid a presidential campaign where the Republican candidates have taken an increasingly hard line on illegal immigration – left undocumented immigrants and their advocates despondent.
“It’s absolutely crushing,” said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the Center for Legal Justice in Northern Virginia. “For so many people, this has been their chance at stability.”
As the challenge to Obama’s programs wound its way through the nation’s highest court, activists around the country launched street rallies, hunger strikes and counter protests that have embodied the nation’s bitter divide over illegal immigration.
“It’s been like a mountain crossing,” said Ana Campos, 31, who left El Salvador in 2006, married a Honduran man who arrived here without legal permission in 2008 and, in 2012, gave birth to a U.S.-born son.
Both parents would qualify for DAPA relief under Obama’s proposal. Campos has been among a group of would-be applicants who has showed up to the Supreme Court steps in Washington every Monday since the court heard the case in April.
Randy Capps, director of U.S. research for the Migration Policy Institute, said the deferred action programs carried more than just the promise of temporary protections against being deported. It would significantly expand economic and educational opportunities for people who are in the country without legal permission, and ultimately could positively benefit up to 10 million people, including undocumented immigrants and their relatives, according to a study done by Capps’s organization and the Washington-based Urban Institute.
“Unauthorized immigrant parents have a lot of problems with autonomy at work, their working conditions, not being paid,” Capps said. “One would assume that, under the DAPA program, these things would improve.”
The issue has inflamed the presidential campaign this year, with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump calling for a wall to be built along the Mexican border and for most undocumented immigrants to be deported. Trump had vowed to cancel Obama’s deportation relief programs if they were upheld in the courts. Presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, said she would take Obama’s executive actions even further.
Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst for the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, said the lack of a clear ruling by the Supreme Court means that Congress will likely have to deal sooner with the fact that there are 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. The sanctioning of the programs by the Supreme Court would have introduced a dangerous precedent, Feere said, by giving the White House authority over what should be a legislative question.
“If you’re a member of Congress, you wouldn’t want the executive branch to usurp your authority over immigration in this way,” Feere said. “Write the bill; pass the bill. That’s how the legislative process works. Once you let that go, then it’s very hard to get that back if you’re part of Congress.”
For many of the affected families, Tuesday’s deadlock means continued uncertainty about building a stable life in the United States.
Rosario Reyes, 38, said her 7-year-old son Victor has been wracked with anxiety over the possibility of seeing her forced to return to El Salvador.
“He keeps asking me: `Who will I live with?’ ” said Reyes, who crossed the border into the United States in 2004 after members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang in El Salvador killed one of her brothers. “They would also assassinate me there. We came here looking for refuge.”
In a region filled with immigrants from around the world, the Supreme Court action also affects families from other parts of Latin America, Africa, South Asia, the Middle East and Europe.
Tsogtsaikhan Tenven and his wife Yurtnasa Jigjid are among the thousands of Koreans in the Washington region who were awaiting word about the two Obama programs.
The couple arrived in 2005 after being unable to find decent work in their homeland. Soon after, they sent for their son, Tsogtsaikhan Bati, who benefitted from the DACA program in 2012.
While his parents worked at restaurants in Northern Virginia, Bati, now 22, used his legal status to attend George Mason University and, after graduating last year, get a job as a mortgage broker.
“My dad; he’s always been optimistic about the possibility of getting legal status,” Bati said, recalling the plans his parents have made about moving from Arlington to a rural part of Virginia.
On Thursday, Bati said, he was angry and disappointed.
“It just seems like they’re toying with people’s lives,” he said about the Supreme Court’s tie vote. “It’s become a political issue rather than something that can have a real impact on people.
Washington Post
