IRLI Sues DOJ for Details on President Obama’s Coordination with Special Interest Groups in Devising

April 1, 2016

Shining a Light on Obama’s Concocted Legal Case for Mass Amnesty

April 01, 2016

(Washington, D.C.) – On behalf of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) announced this week that it filed a lawsuit (attached here) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking records from the Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding the president’s 2014 executive amnesties now before the Supreme Court (Federation for American Immigration Reform v. Department of Justice, Case No. 1:16-cv-00591). Through a public records request filed last year, FAIR had asked for records regarding the White House’s coordination with certain open-borders academics and other mass immigration activists, a request that the Obama DOJ has been obstructing in violation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

Unlike Obama’s first mass amnesty decree in 2012 (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program), the 2014 Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) and extended DACA amnesty decrees were announced concurrently with a made-to-order legal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the DOJ subagency that’s supposed to provide fair and objective legal advice to the president. Immigration-control advocates with experience in immigration law might have noticed that the arguments asserted in the OLC’s opinion lined up closely with what certain open-borders academics have been peddling for decades, namely that the president has the power to hand out work-permits and amnesty benefits to anyone he wants. Importantly, DOJ litigators have taken up these same arguments in their challenge against a Texas federal court’s injunction of Obama’s DAPA/DACA+ amnesties which is scheduled to be heard before the Supreme Court this month.

Through its FOIA request and lawsuit, FAIR is investigating whether the Obama Administration is coordinating with these immigration law “experts” in its attempt to make its unilateral amnesty decree appear constitutional and in line with our immigration laws. Among other items, FAIR is requesting communications between the DOJ’s amnesty legal team and several key open-borders advocates, including certain influential law professors, “experts” from the Soros-funded Migration Policy Institute, and the president’s main advisor on amnesty, former lobbyist for the National Council of La Raza, Cecilia Munoz.

IRLI Executive Director, Dale L. Wilcox, commented, “The records we expect to obtain in response to our suit we hope will assist Texas and the other 25-state plaintiffs in their court-challenge against the Obama Administration.” Wilcox continued, “shining a light on the outside-interests assisting the government to do its dirty work should help the courts and the public better understand that the legal case for Obama’s wage-crushing and budget-busting blanket amnesty is 100 percent complete fiction.”