Government lawyers still have not made good on their promise to directly file a motion with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift a temporary hold that was placed on President Obama's immigration actions by a federal judge.
What immigration advocates are anticipating is that government lawyers could either file a motion to stay the hold that was placed on the immigration programs or, alternatively, the government could file a motion to expedite the appeal. Government lawyers did file a notice of appeal on the overall ruling on February 23, but the effort to lift the temporary hold is a more immediate concern. The government has twice threatened to bypass the federal judge who put a temporary hold on Obama's immigration actions, but both deadlines they set—Feb. 25 and March 9—have passed without a hint of movement from the Obama administration.
The temporary halt to the immigrations actions, some of which were due to begin last month, came from a federal district judge in Brownsville, TX, Andrew Hanen. Immigration advocates think Hanen, who has a history of overreach on cases related to immigration, is purposely trying to drag out a lawsuit filed by 26 states in order to keep the immigration actions from going into effect for as long as possible.
How Judge Hanen is politicizing case and stalling exec action, and what DOJ should do abt it. MR by @imillhiser
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— @FrankSharry
A recent
New York Times profile of Hanen noted the slant of some his more recent work on immigration cases.
In December 2013, after sentencing a migrant smuggler, he issued a broadside when he learned that the authorities had delivered a child, the smuggler’s cargo, to the child’s mother, an unauthorized immigrant in Virginia. Judge Hanen accused the administration of “successfully completing the mission of the criminal conspiracy.”
In August, he held forth when a gang member from El Salvador whom he had previously sent to prison turned up in California after deportation and was granted a form of asylum. The administration, he said, “has pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it into the streets of Los Angeles, with the faint hope it will not go off.”
Judge Hanen supplemented that opinion with charts of the leadership of Mexican drug cartels. “Rewarding gang or cartel members for their own antisocial activities endangers everyone in the United States,” he wrote.
11:07 AM PT: This post previously reported that the government had in fact filed a motion with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay Judge Hanen's hold. That is factually incorrect and the post has been changed accordingly.
Thu Mar 12, 2015 at 12:35 PM PT: UPDATE: The government on Thursday filed a motion with the appeals court to lift the hold that's blocking Obama's immigration actions.