Has prosecutorial discretion taken one for the team?
A federal judge in Texas has blocked yet another of President Biden’s major immigration policies.
Federal Judge Drew Tipton threw out a Department of Homeland Security policy that limits who immigration authorities can arrest and deport. In a ruling published Friday, Tipton sided with the states of Texas and Louisiana, which argued that the DHS guidance is preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from enforcing the law.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the policy last year, directing immigration authorities to prioritize serious threats to public safety and national security, as well as recent border-crossers.
The “prioritize” stuff is nonsense. Obviously.
Obama used this to declare that a bunch of illegals were not exempt from immigration enforcement and were all but legalized. Biden was going even further.
Mayorkas said that being present in the country without authorization “should not alone be the basis” for arrest or removal — a sharp reversal from the Trump administration, when ICE agents and officers were free to detain anyone they encountered who was in the country illegally.
Correction, a sharp reversal from the law.
“The Executive Branch may prioritize its resources. But it must do so within the bounds set by Congress,” Tipton wrote. “Using the words ‘discretion’ and ‘prioritization,’ the Executive Branch claims the authority to suspend statutory mandates. The law does not sanction this approach.”
The Biden admin, like the Obama admin, was effective gutting laws and codes, and then creating new entitlements using the “discretionary” approach.
Can an administration decide to effectively stop enforcing certain laws? The question has been asked whether a GOP president could tell the IRS to stop pursuing certain kinds of cases as a form of “discretion”.
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