WASHINGTON – A frustrated President Barack Obama on Thursday decried the Supreme Court’s decision not to lift an injunction against his immigration program and blamed Republicans for standing in the way of progress, as he and other Democrats vowed to turn immigration into a election litmus test.
“Here’s the bottom line: We’ve got a very real choice that America faces right now,” Obama said during a hastily arranged appearance in the White House briefing room. “We’ve got a choice about who we’re going to be as a country, what we want to teach our kids and how we want to be represented in Congress and in the White House. ... In November, Americans are going to have to make a decision about what we care about and who we are.”
The high court’s 4-4 deadlock in U.S. v. Texas meant that a lower court’s injunction against Obama’s deferred action program, designed to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation, remains in place and that is unlikely to be permitted to go forward before he leaves office.
That decision represented a major blow to Obama, who announced plans for the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program in November 2014 shortly after Republicans won control of the Senate during the midterm elections. The president said he was acting through executive action to reform the immigration system because the GOP-controlled House had blocked a comprehensive immigration reform bill.
Obama on Thursday lambasted the GOP for failing to grant a confirmation hearing to Merrick Garland, his nominee to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat, and he accused Republicans of using the issue of immigration to “scare people” by using “words like ‘amnesty’ to whip up votes.”
Obama emphasized that the immigrants who would be eligible for legal protections under DAPA have lived in the United States for years. “Leaving a broken system that way is not a solution,” he said. “That’s the real amnesty.”
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has pledged to deport all of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants and build a wall along the southern U.S. border.
Obama did not mention Trump by name but said those plans amounted to “a fantasy.”
And, he added, “it demeans our tradition of being both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. Immigration is not something to fear. Nor do we have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right.”
On the campaign trail, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton wrote message on Twitter in both English and Spanish calling the ruling “heartbreaking” because it “could tear apart 5 million families.” Trump did not immediately react.
A federal judge in Texas, who is reviewing the constitutionality of the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, put the Obama administration’s program on hold in February 2015, a day before it was about to begin. A federal appeals court later upheld the injunction, propelling the case to the Supreme Court.
Congressional Democrats and immigration advocates echoed Obama’s frustration and vowed to turn the temporary defeat in the high court into a campaign issue to motivate Latinos and other immigrant groups. In 2012, Obama won re-election over Republican Mitt Romney with support from more than 70 percent of Latinos and Asian Americans.
