Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio
A federal appeals court panel Monday was not impressed with a legal challenge to President Obama's 2014 immigration actions brought by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio last November. Lindsay Dunsmuir
has the details:
Two of the three judges weighing the case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit signaled some agreement with a D.C. federal judge who ruled in late December that Arpaio lacked standing to sue, a provision in U.S. law that means he has to prove he has been directly harmed.
Arpaio contends that his office has been harmed because, among other reasons, there are criminals who would not be deported in the country as a result.
"I wasn't entirely clear ... there is no suspension of deportation with respect to those people," Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee, said to Arpaio's lawyer Larry Klayman.
They are more likely to be deported, she added.
The movement of the case,
Joseph Arpaio v. Barack Obama, et al, now at the D.C. Court of Appeals, stands in stark contrast to how another case,
Texas v. United States, is proceeding in the 5th Circuit, where the pace has been far more leisurely.
After Arpaio's November filing, a federal judge in the District of Columbia threw out the challenge the following month. Arpaio then filed an appeal, which was heard by the appeals panel Monday.
The Texas challenge was filed in December. Two months later, Judge Andrew Hanen ruled that the 26 states did have "standing" to bring the lawsuit and issued a preliminary injunction to stop Obama's immigration programs from moving forward just two days before they were due to go into effect.
Though Hanen issued that decision in time to block the immigration actions, he has displayed little sense of urgency since. Hanen first ignored and then rejected the administration's request to lift his injunction, forcing government lawyers to seek an injunction from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. All this and Judge Hanen still hasn't heard oral arguments in the case.
The good news here is that a 5th Circuit Appeals Court panel recently ruled unanimously that the state of Mississippi did not have standing to challenge Obama's 2012 executive actions on immigration.