This week the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals put the brakes, rather a wheel lock, on President Obama’s prosecutorial discretion initiatives, DAPA and an expanded DACA, deciding not to lift the stay of implementation of these programs in a decision on May 26, 2015. Legal experts predict that it may take until the President’s time in office is nearly up before the programs gets underway and by then millions of people who would be eligible for the programs may be…

Last week saw federal judges twice stymie the executive branch by enjoining the Department of Homeland Security from doing what it wants to do. The first injunction, in Texas v. USA,  stopped the government from doing something nice for the undocumented – beginning the implementation of the first of the President’s executive actions announced last November. The action  was to expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to both earlier and later arriving children. The second injunction, in…

President Obama on Thursday ordered his Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson,  to review the government’s immigration policies to determine ways to make them more humane, a response, some speculate, to mounting pressure from advocates to stem deportations of illegal immigrants. Here’s the problem. There are lots of people in the United States who have entered the United States with visas and overstayed them and lots of people who entered illegally. Most came to work. Many married and started families, started businesses, bought homes. Some…

TRAC, a data gathering, data research, and data distribution organization at Syracuse University, reported that immigration judges are deporting fewer aliens as a percent of those in removal proceedings. The report states: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had diminishing success in convincing Immigration Judges to issue removal orders.  Such orders are now granted only about 50 percent of the time, the lowest level since systematic tracking began more than 20 years ago. For years, the rate at which removal…