U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said he supports the preliminary injunction handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen blocking — at least temporarily — President Obama’s executive orders on immigration.
“United States District Judge Andrew Hanen recognized the direct damage and irreparable harm that will be caused by President Obama’s unconstitutional executive actions,” Issa said in a written statement. “On 22 separate occasions, President Obama himself admitted the Constitution did not grant him authority to take executive action on immigration. The president, preferring to steamroll Congress and the American people rather than engage in dialogue with them, has now changed his tune and sought to vest himself with the unchecked authority to rewrite our immigration system in a last-ditch effort to craft his preferred ideological legacy. But the fact remains that the president’s proposal, aside from being blatantly unconstitutional, is both bad for America and bad for the very people it purports to help, ultimately leaving them in legal limbo, rather than finally taking decisive action.”
In November, Obama released a list of executive orders he planned to activate to address the undocumented-immigrant problems along the U.S.-Mexican border. The initiatives focus on deporting felons, but would grant amnesty for millions of men, women and children who have crossed into the U.S. illegally.
Hanen’s ruling will stall activation of these initiatives, giving a coalition of 26 states time to pull together the information it needs to move forward with a lawsuit it has filed to halt the orders permanently. In a memo accompanying his ruling, the judge said the lawsuit should be pursued and that the injunction was necessary to protect its integrity.
“The genie would be impossible to put back into the bottle,” he wrote, meaning that if the states were to win their suit, it would be impossible to reverse amnesty if Obama’s orders were implemented now. Hanen also said the administration was “not rewriting laws,” but instead “creating them from scratch.”