A federal judge in Brownsville, Texas, has issued an injunction against President Obama’s recent immigration actions. I don’t take this even slightly seriously. To see why, all you have to do is read to the end of the New York Times account:
Judge Hanen, who was appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, has excoriated the Obama administration’s immigration policies in several unusually outspoken rulings….At a hearing on Jan. 15, Judge Hanen said Brownsville, which sits on the border with Mexico, was an appropriate venue for the suit because
its residents see the impact of immigration every day. “Talking to anyone in Brownsville about immigration is like talking to Noah about the flood,” Judge Hanen said.
In a long and colorful opinion last August, Judge Hanen departed from the issue at hand to accuse the Obama administration of adopting a deportation policy that “endangers America” and was “an open invitation to the most dangerous criminals in society.”
The case involved a Salvadoran immigrant with a long criminal record whom Judge Hanen had earlier sent to prison for five years. Instead of deporting the man after he served his sentence, an immigration judge in Los Angeles ordered him released, a decision Judge Hanen found “incredible.” Citing no specific evidence, he surmised that the administration had adopted a broader policy of releasing such criminals.
While acknowledging that he had no jurisdiction to alter policy, Judge Hanen said he relied on his “firsthand, in-the-trenches knowledge of the border situation” and “at least a measurable level of common sense” to reach his conclusions about the case.
Judge Andrew Hanen so obviously hates both Obama and his immigration actions that no one is going to take his decision seriously. It’s a polemic, not a proper court ruling. The case will continue its dreary way through Hanen’s docket, but I imagine an appeals court will stay the injunction pretty quickly, and then overrule his inevitable final ruling in short order. The right-wing plaintiffs in this case may have thought they were being clever in venue shopping to get the case before Hanen, but it won’t do them any good. It might even backfire, given just how transparently political Hanen’s ruling is.
This story makes for a good headline, but it probably means little in real life. At most we’ll have a delay of a few weeks in implementing Obama’s immigration orders.
