The Washington Post: "Appeals court strikes down proof-of-citizenship voting requirement in 3 states"

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has reversed a prior ruling that allowed certain state US election agencies to require a proof-of-citizenship for a mail-in federal voter registration form used for November’s election in Kansas, Alabama, and Georgia. To date, Kansas was the only state to actually enforce the rule, and in oral arguments, civil rights groups claimed that if permitted the ID provision could potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of US citizens applying to vote in Kansas without required papers. 

The requirement entailed a “demand to show documentation such as a birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers instead of accepting signed and sworn affirmation of citizenship to register to vote in federal races.” Two US Appeals Court judges, Judith W. Rogers and Stephen F. Williams, granted a preliminary injunction and the case will go back down to the district court.

For native and naturalized citizens, one of the greatest rights one possesses is the right to vote for public officers; however, voter requirements, including providing a state-issued ID or proof of citizenship, have been considered by some an undue burden and discriminatory. The Obama administration has waged ongoing battles with conservative lawyers and Republican lawmakers over voter requirements and who will be eligible to vote in this year’s presidential election, and the administration has asked federal appeals courts to repeal new voting laws passed in Texas, North Carolina, and other states. Chris Carson, president of the League of Women Voters, who brought the suit in this case, says voting should be made easier, not harder: “We are grateful to the court of appeals for stopping this thinly veiled discrimination in its tracks,” she tells The Washington Post. “All eligible Americans deserve the opportunity to register and vote without obstacles.”

In this case, voter groups sued after what they called an “unauthorized and unilateral decision” earlier this year by Brian D. Newby, executive director of the US Election Assistance Commission, to grant the three states’ requests to change the federal registration form to include new ID requirements to reportedly combat voter fraud. In the 2-1 ruling, US Appeals Court Judge A. Raymond Randolph, disagreed with his fellow judges and agreed with Newby stating that it would “raise serious constitutional doubts” if the federal elections assistance body prevented a state from “enforcing its voter qualifications.” Kansas Secretary of State Kris W. Kobach, who defended the voter ID requirement in court, claimed that “any harm to potential voters was speculative.” The final result of this case remains to be seen as it is now back with the district court, though Kobach stated previously that if the state were to lose it would retroactively allow voters to cast ballots in federal races if their applications were canceled solely because they did not document citizenship.

Inside Sources: “On Tax Day, Remember the Contributions of Unauthorized Immigrants”

Millions of Americans have filed their taxes in advance of the April 18 “Tax Day” deadline. And it’s not only US citizens paying taxes. Undocumented immigrants also make immense federal, state, and local tax contributions, as Tom Jawetz at the Center for American Progress points out. A recent study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) claims that undocumented immigrants pay an estimated yearly $11.64 billion in state and local taxes, adding significant amounts of money to state and local budgets. Tax contributions by undocumented immigrants also help to ensure the solvency of federal programs such as Social Security—the Chief Actuary of the Social Security Administration reported that in 2010 undocumented immigrants paid a net $12 billion in tax revenue into Social Security—even though many undocumented immigrants are unlikely to benefit from the programs themselves.

The study also claims providing a pathway for legal status in the US for undocumented workers would translate into even more tax revenue. ITEP’s analysis claims that combined state and local tax contributions of the nation’s eleven million undocumented immigrants would “increase by more than $800 million under full implementation of the administration’s 2012 and 2014 executive actions and by more than $2.1 billion under comprehensive immigration reform.” Meg Wiehe, ITEP State Tax Policy Director, said in a statement: “Regardless of the politically contentious nature of immigration reform, the data show undocumented immigrants greatly contribute to our nation’s economy, not just in labor but also with tax dollars. With immigration policy playing a key role in state and national debates and President Obama’s 2014 executive action facing review by the Supreme Court, accurate information about the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants is needed now more than ever.”

Texas, which sued the Obama administration over plans to expand the Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) program, would reportedly see an additional $154 million yearly in new tax revenues each year if Obama’s executive actions were put in place. Moreover, the Joint Committee on Taxation found that blocking the deferred action initiatives would increase the size of the federal deficit by $7.5 billion over ten years. The Supreme Court will issue a ruling for Texas's lawsuit, United States v. Texas, this summer.

New York Times: “Scalia’s Absence Is Likely to Alter Court’s Major Decisions This Term”

Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent death will likely complicate the work of the Supreme Court’s eight remaining justices for the rest of the court’s term as well as possibly change the outcomes of major cases facing the court including the closely-watched and highly-anticipated United States v. Texas. This case stems from Texas and other state’s challenge to President Obama’s plan to defer the deportations of more than four million unauthorized immigrants by expanding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) with a larger program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), which would grant “lawful presence” to certain undocumented immigrants who have relatives lawfully in the US.  

Since the court requires at least five votes to accomplish most things, if a case is deadlocked at 4-to-4, the court can automatically affirm the decision under review without giving reasons and without setting a Supreme Court precedent—which in the case of United States v. Texas would uphold the lower court injunction against DAPA—or, more likely some say, the court can set the case down for re-argument in the fall term starting in October in the hope that the case will be decided by a full court. A full court, however, by the fall term is very unlikely since the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee has stated that they will oppose any Obama nominee, nor hold any committee meeting on a nominee. “It has been an extraordinarily long time since the Supreme Court has been forced to deal with a departure that occurs in the middle of the term, as the court does here with Justice Scalia’s death,” Justin Driver, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times. 

While it cannot be said for sure how Scalia would have ruled in United States v. Texas, his angry dissent in the case over Arizona's harsh immigration law in Arizona v. United States may be an indication. In that dissent, Scalia directly criticized Obama's immigration policy of deferring deportation for potential DREAM Act beneficiaries and described Arizonans as being "under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy." 

The Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that argues for low-immigration numbers, points out that the Obama administration’s insistence that the Supreme Court hear the case as quickly as possible before the merits have been fully argued in the lower courts may backfire, since a Republican-controlled Senate may be even more unlikely to confirm an Obama appointee this year given the important precedent-setting nature of United States v. Texas. Randal Meyer, a legal associate at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, believes there is a possibility that even with Scalia gone the Court may vote in favor of Texas since there is “some chance that at least some of the liberal justices will ‘switch sides’ to reign in presidential lawlessness, as executive authority can be wielded by both parties.”

The New York Times points out, however, that it’s possible that Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy, or both may join the liberals on the bench in rejecting the lawsuit’s challenge, perhaps on the ground that “Texas lacks the direct and concrete injury that gives it standing to sue.” Shikha Dalmia, a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, unconventionally argues that Scalia may have been an unexpected immigration ally to court progressives in this case. Despite his heated dissent in Arizona v. United States, she writes, Scalia “had strong (though somewhat inconsistent) civil libertarian tendencies that more than occasionally came to the defense of immigrants. Also, his judicial commitment to apply the text of the Constitution and law as written may well have prompted him to uphold these programs.”

Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law's Andrea Saenz explains further: "Scalia voted with his liberal colleagues for the noncitizen over the government in nearly every landmark crimmigration case [sentencing of immigrants involved in crimes] in recent history." Saenz argues that Scalia had no “inherent animus against immigrants and could be convinced by good arguments based on proper statutory construction.”

David Leopold, a past president and general counsel of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told Bloomberg DNA that he believed the court would favor the Obama administration despite Scalia's absence. “I don't think that we're necessarily looking at a 4-4 decision,” he said. “The administration has a very strong case…I do strongly believe that the court is going to reverse the Fifth Circuit[.].” Attorney Beth Werlin agrees:

The fact of the matter is that this case was never about Justice Scalia. The President’s executive actions on immigration are lawful exercises of his discretion, and in adopting these policies, he simply is enforcing existing immigration laws passed by Congress. The Supreme Court precedent on this is clear. The Court has repeatedly held that it is well within the executive’s authority to decide how and when to enforce the law and to exercise prosecutorial discretion. As recently as 2012, in Arizona v. United States, the Supreme affirmed that the federal government has discretion to set immigration enforcement priorities.

The expanded DACA and DAPA programs, she goes on to say, clearly falls within this and consequently she believes there will be a clear majority in favor of the Obama administration.  United States v. Texas is scheduled to be argued in April of this year, and we’ll provide more updates as the case progresses and the Supreme Court issues their decision.

ABC News: “US Agents Round up Central Americans Slated for Deportation”

Immigration agents over the weekend began conducting raids targeting the removal of Central American families as well as unaccompanied children who crossed over the US southern border without documentation over the past two years. The raids, seen as an effort to deter future undocumented immigrants from crossing the border, are targeting individuals who have entered the US since May 2014, have been issued final orders of removal by an immigration court, have exhausted appropriate legal remedies, and have no outstanding appeal or claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief, according to a statement by Jeh Johnson, the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

In the statement, Johnson said that the 121 people rounded up this past weekend during raids in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina were transferred to family detention centers mainly in Texas to await removal. Johnson said the raids “should come as no surprise” and noted that he has said “publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed.”

Although these latest actions affect only a small part of the more than 100,000 Central American family members, mostly mothers with children, who crossed into the US since 2014, the raids have been strongly condemned by many. Greg Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), told the AP the group was "shocked and outraged" to hear of the raids targeting "women and children who are extremely vulnerable and by and large have fled from horrendous violence in their home countries."

The immigration surge in the past two years has been linked to a rise in gang-related violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as well as extreme poverty in the region, while some immigrants crossed the border to reunite with family members in the US or to claim asylum.

One family caught up in the immigration raids was Maria Hernandez and her two sons, who fled gang violence in El Salvador in 2014. They were asleep early Saturday morning in her parents' Dallas home when immigration agents banged on the door. "They entered all the rooms and woke up my kids, saying they had a deportation order," Hernandez told VICE News in Spanish. "We were very surprised—I was almost naked when they entered. We were all crying."

The agents took Hernandez and her six- and nine-year-old sons into custody and drove them first to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office and then to a detention center in South Texas, from where they will be deported to El Salvador. "They told us that in two days they'll send us to our country," Hernandez said Monday in a phone interview with Vice News from the South Texas Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. "It's the worst thing that could happen. We all have threats on our lives."

A Guardian investigation last year into the consequences of Obama’s deportation policies revealed many US deportees have been murdered shortly after returning to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with a study saying as many as eighty-three returning deportees have been killed since 2014.

Guatemala's Vice Minister Oscar Padilla said that starting Monday “consulates would be interviewing and reviewing the cases of citizens on deportation lists to ensure that each has an order signed by a judge.” The foreign ministry also advised Guatemalans in the US that they “need not open their doors to immigration agents unless the officers have a warrant signed by a judge, and that they carry with them at all times phone numbers of family members, a lawyer and the nearest consulate.”

Immigration activist groups have also begun alerting undocumented immigrants of the impending raids and informing them of their rights through videos, social media, and email and phone blasts. Advocates are noting that immigrants have the right to deny ICE officials entry; immigration agents must have an order signed by a judge to enter a house. “To be on the safe side, just don’t answer the door,” Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer, told the LA Times. “The problem is if you open the door, then it’s he said, she said. But if you never open the door, there’s proof—they have to break it down.”