Since returning from Thanksgiving break for the final sessions of the 113th Congress, several members of Congress are calling for the immediate defunding of President Obama's executive amnesty.
In wake of House Speaker John Boehner's (R-Ohio) announcement of the House's plan on dealing with President Obama's executive amnesty, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) released a statement condemning the plan saying it "fails to meet that test." Senator Sessions then calls on Congress to instead defund President Obama's amnesty.
Washington, D.C. – On Tuesday, December 2, 2014 at 1:00 p.m., the House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on President Obama’s executive overreach on immigration. Although President Obama has stated over 20 times that he does not have the constitutional authority to change our immigration laws unilaterally, he recently proclaimed that five million unlawful immigrants will be able to stay and work in the United States without a vote of Congress.
The Congressional Research Service determined that Congress can block funding for the president’s plan to hand out work permits for illegal aliens, Breitbart reports. House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky., had claimed that Congress did not have to power to remove funding because the agency under which work permits and other documents are distributed is funded by applicant fees.
Glenn Kessler -- The Washington Post
Who knew that an article that appeared on Page 3 of the metro section of the New York Times nearly a quarter-century ago could have such resonance in today’s policy debates?
Throughout the week, NumbersUSA has been running full-page ads in several political journals, including Politico, Roll Call, The Hill and National Journal. Each day, an ad highlighted different aspects of President Obama's executive amnesty. They ranged from polling data to the unconstitutionality of his plan to his ever-changing stance on allowing millions of illegal aliens stay and work in the United States.
The topic of President Obama's executive amnesty was hotly discussed at the annual meeting of the Republican Governors Association (RGA) this week in Florida. Several Republican chief state executives gave their thoughts on the upcoming announcement and how best to deal with the situation.
As President Obama's announcement of executive action on immigration grows nearer, details about his plan are starting to emerge. The plan will grant amnesty and work permits to an estimated 5 million illegal aliens and provide more work visas for foreign tech workers.
The Daily Caller -- Neil Munro
President Barack Obama’s unilateral amnesty will quickly add as many foreign workers to the nation’s legal labor force as the total number of new jobs created by his economy since 2009.
The plans, expected to be announced late Nov. 20, will distribute five million work permits to illegal immigrants, and also create a new inflow of foreign college graduates for prestigious salaried jobs, according to press reports.
Breitbart News -- Matthew Boyle
A defense contractor and top campaign contributor to House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) is in the running to get a contract to print millions of IDs and other government documents associated with the president’s planned executive amnesty, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
According to the Washington Post, President Obama will announce on Thursday his plans to grant executive amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. The plan would reportedly expand his 2012 directive, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) that granted amnesty and work permits to illegal aliens meeting certain criteria, and extend similar benefits to illegal-alien parents of children who are U.S. citizens or green card holders.
Politico -- Carrie Buddoff Brown and Seung Min Kim
President Barack Obama will announce Thursday that he is shielding about 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, circumventing Congress to provide the most sweeping changes to immigration policy in decades.
Obama released a video Wednesday previewing his primetime speech and his Friday trip to Las Vegas.
The Daily Caller -- Neil Munro
President Obama once declared that an influx of illegal immigrants will harm “the wages of blue-collar Americans” and “put strains on an already overburdened safety net.”
Breitbart -- Matthew Boyle
Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA said it’s time for Boehner to stand up to Obama instead of running to the courts for cover.
This week, Breitbart News published op-eds penned by Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) in which they discuss President Obama's executive amnesty and what to do about it.
The Wall Street Journal reports Administration insiders as saying the president’s executive amnesty may use two main criteria in deciding whether illegal aliens get additional protection from deportation - a minimum period of residence in the U.S. and family ties to others in the country. The vast majority of illegal aliens are already safe from deportations due to the Administration’s non-enforcement policies.
National Review -- A.J. Delgado
A judge in Oregon has dismissed the deportation case against Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant who killed two young girls in a hit-and-run car accident last year. Though Garcia-Cisneros was in the midst of removal proceedings, she is now released and will not face deportation. Garcia-Cisneros, who came from Mexico as a child, had permission to be in the country under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program instituted by President Obama in 2012.
NPR -- Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
Eleven states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws to grant driver's licenses to immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. But applicants face hurdles, like language barriers and fear of deportation.
Boston Herald -- Joe Battenfeld, Hillary Chabot
The Patrick administration has informed Homeland Security officials the state “will have the ability” to dole out special driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants as part of its plan to comply with a tougher federal ID law.
Ezra Klein and David Frum agree that mass immigration yields benefits for millions of American professionals in the form of more affordable services. They agree that the tradeoffs - including lower wages and reduced opportunities - mostly fall on low-wage workers (although I know some American STEM workers who would beg to differ). But they disagree on whether concern for low-skilled workers should be central to immigration policy.
Several Republican Senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have joined Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) in his push for a Senate vote on a House measure that would defund Pres. Obama's executive amnesties. The bill, introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and passed by the House on their final day of session before leaving for the August recess, would defund any efforts made by the administration to renew applications under Pres. Obama's DACA program and defund any future work permits.
Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told his Republican Caucus he will soon announce whether the House will sue President Barack Obama to challenge the potentially unconstitutional actions his administration has taken, according to a report in Roll Call. Boehner did not say which executive actions will be challenged but the lawsuit could zero in on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
In an effort to jumpstart House action, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., today again proposed to pass an amnesty bill with a 2017 effective date to mollify Republican concerns that Obama will not carry out the legislation’s enforcement provisions. A spokesman for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, dismissed the offer saying that President Obama would then have no incentive to enforce immigration law for the rest of his term.
In a recent PBS interview, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson said he is “taking a fresh look at the Secure Communities program,” which has been subject to withering opposition by illegal-alien advocacy groups. The hand-picked law enforcement officials who met with Johnson last week also want the program re-evaluated but others do not want to diminish its effectiveness.
Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., was indicted on federal fraud charges for under-reporting the payroll and wages at his New York City restaurant, and for employing illegal aliens. He surrendered to federal authorities today.
In a letter to President Obama, 22 Republican senators said the deportation policy changes under consideration by DHS would represent “a near complete abandonment of basic immigration enforcement and discard the rule of law and the notion the United States has enforceable borders.” The letter warns Obama to improve immigration enforcement, not look for ways to weaken it.
House Democrats are urging 30 Republicans who've said they support some form of amnesty to sign a discharge petition and force a floor vote on H.R. 15, their comprehensive amnesty bill. "We're calling out the members of the House…who have said they support immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship," said Rep. Jared Polis, D-Colo. "We're saying, 'Do something about your support…(P)ut their pen where their mouth is."
The Denver public school is on track to hire as teachers illegal aliens who received a two-year stay of deportation and a work permit under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Critics say the move is unfair to unemployed citizens who are qualified educators.
Illegal-alien advocates staged protests in several dozen cities on April 5 to demand a freeze on deportations and the passage of so-called comprehensive immigration reform this year. Immigration-enforcement supporters turned out as well in a number of places.
Republicans voted down a Democratic amendment to the fiscal year 2015 budget bill that would have included funds for so-called comprehensive immigration reform. Media are portraying the gambit as the first major immigration fight of the year but Democrats offered the amendment knowing it wouldn’t pass. The political ploy was meant to put Republicans on the record as voting against the preferred Democratic method of immigration reform.
As the Obama Administration searches for options to broaden its executive amnesty, a new analysis by Sen. Jeff Sessions reveals that only two percent of removals in 2013 did not meet DHS’ criminal-oriented enforcement “priorities.” He says DHS policies leave illegal aliens virtually immune from immigration enforcement unless they commit a serious crime and invite foreign nationals to overstay a visa or enter the U.S. illegally,
Senate Democrats blocked a vote on an amendment offered by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) that would have closed a loophole that gives illegal aliens access to the Additional Child Tax Credit. The amendment sought to restore cuts in military pensions under the budget deal by shifting funds from the welfare loophole.
During an online video chat on Wednesday, White House Domestic Policy Advisor Cecilia Munoz said that the Obama Administration will renew deferred action for illegal aliens who arrived in the United States as children when they expire after the initial two year period. President's Obama's executive amnesty program for young illegal aliens has given work permits and legal status to 567,563 illegal aliens between the ages of 15 and 31.
A delegation of members of the Oireachtas Éireann (the Irish national parliament) has visited Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of comprensive immigration reform.
In a marked change of strategy, illegal aliens and their supporters have decided to shun peaceful tactics in their struggle to gain amnesty for illegal aliens. Instead, they intend to take more radical actions to force their own arrest.
A "fly-in" backed by Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg will be bringing pro-amnesty conservatives to D.C. to lobby Congress.
Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a pro-enforcement group on immigration, complained that amid the federal shutdown resources were found "to move forward with Obamacare" and its online insurance signup but not the online E-Verify.
"It’s a sign that putting Americans back to work is never the top priority of this president or Republicans or Democrats in Congress," Beck said. He worries the federal government may not require employers to retroactively use E-Verify for anyone they hire during the federal shutdown. "That would be a grave mistake."
Today marks the 19th day of August Congressional Recess in which the open-borders forces were supposed to have been able to change enough Republican Representatives' minds to get a full-scale amnesty and doubling of legal immigration to the floor of the House. I'm pleased to say that thus far there has been almost no sign of changed minds thanks in good measure to NumbersUSA activists who have attended more than 200 town hall meetings. These are constituents seeing their own Congressman and not a case of busing people in from the outside or staging political theatre as the other side has done so often.
The Federal District Court in Dallas concluded that the 10 ICE agents who claimed that the executive DACA amnesty violated federal law "were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Department of Homeland Security has implemented a program contrary to congressional mandate. However, the Court finds that Congress has precluded Plaintiffs from pursuing their claims in this Court by enacting the CSRA.”
“The vast majority of Republicans in the House do not have any kind of electorate that is pushing for this,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that opposes a path to citizenship. If a House Republican supports an immigration-law rewrite “it would be the perfect opportunity for a challenger” in a primary in 2014, he said.http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-24/cantaloupe-growers-lobby-congress-on-immigration-reform.html
Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) uncovered a loop hole in the Gang of Eight immigration bill that would allow illegal aliens to access state and local welfare benefits immediately, according to a press release issued by his office.
The Department of Homeland Security published updated guidelines for the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that say illegal aliens who receive deferred action are “lawfully present” in the United States but do not have “lawful status.” The new statement is meant to influence the debate over whether such illegal aliens can access driver’s licenses or benefits such as in-state tuition under state laws that require legal presence.
By giving certain illegal aliens executive amnesty, the Obama Administration forced states to decide whether such persons would be eligible for state benefits such as driver’s licenses and taxpayer-subsidized in-state tuition. Some states have made their decisions but more debate, especially in state legislatures, is expected in 2013.
The Illinois House sent Gov. Pat Quinn a bill (SB 957) that would give illegal aliens access to driver’ licenses. Quinn said he would sign the measure, which would give licenses to an estimated 250,000 illegal aliens.
The office of Conn. Gov. Daniel Malloy confirmed the state will give driving privileges to illegal aliens approved for the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The details are currently being worked out.
The Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is suing Secretary of State Ruth Johnson on behalf of executive amnesty recipients who have been denied driver's licenses under her interpretation of state law.
Last month, Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.) sent a letter to the Social Security Administration requesting details on how the agency would manage the issuance of Social Security numbers to illegal aliens who receive deferred action and a work permit through the Obama Administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Rep. Gingrey asked for a response by November 30, 2012, but has yet to receive one.
A committee of the Illinois Senate approved a bill (SB 957) that would give illegal aliens access to temporary driver’s licenses. The bill will likely pass during the legislature’s veto session since it has the support of prominent legislators in both chambers, including the Senate and House Republican leaders.
The ACLU and other pro-illegal alien groups sued Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer today to block her executive order denying driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who get executive amnesty under the Obama Administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. If successful, the lawsuit could affect other states that have denied licenses to DACA recipients.
"Illegal immigration is a market indicator," said Roy Beck, CEO of NumbersUSA, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank that advocates lower levels of legal and illegal immigration. "They all got gigantic networks of family and friends who are already here sending information back and forth. So this is basically another sign that the economy is picking up."http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/10/25/improved-economy-draws-immigrants/1658975/
