It has lately become fashionable for states
that oppose President Obama’s immigration executive actions to sue in federal
court on grounds that they are unconstitutional. But in order to get heard in
court, a state must demonstrate standing.
In the Texas v. United States litigation
challenging President Obama’s November 2014 Deferred Action for Parent
Accountability Program (DAPA) and expanded Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrival (DACA) programs, plaintiff states led by Texas successfully invoked
standing by equating immigrants to noxious air pollutants that cause greenhouse
gases. While greenhouse gases can only cause harm, immigrants, legal or not,
are more likely to confer benefits than harm. Is it appropriate for a judge to
give standing to a state opposing federal immigration policy based on the sort
of harm that pollutants would cause it?
Parties seeking to resolve disputes in federal
court must present actual “Cases” or “Controversies” under Article III of the
US Constitution. Plaintiffs must demonstrate that they have standing in order
to satisfy Article III. They must establish three elements set forth in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S.
555, 560 (1992) that there is 1) an
injury in fact, (2) a sufficient causal connection between the injury and the
conduct complained of, and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed
by a favorable decision.
In Texas v. United States, the states attempted
to show harm through the influx of immigrants who will remain in the United
States through deferrals of their removals and thus burden them. The basis for
linking the harm caused by immigrants to noxious pollutants stems from the seminal
Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts
v. EPA in which plaintiffs requested the Environmental Protection
Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles under section
202 of the Clean Air Act. After EPA refused to do so, plaintiffs, which
included Massachusetts, sought review of the EPA’s refusal in the Supreme Court
to regulate greenhouse gases. Massachusetts successfully sought standing under Lujan by showing that global warming
caused by greenhouse gas emissions was so widespread that the failure of the
EPA to regulate them would cause the state environmental damage such as coastal
flooding of its shores. Justice Steven delivered the opinion of the Court by
beginning with this broad pronouncement on global warming:
A
well-documented rise in global temperatures has coincided with a significant
increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected
scientists believe the two trends are related. For when carbon dioxide is
released into the atmosphere, it acts like the ceiling of a greenhouse,
trapping solar energy and retarding the escape of reflected heat. It is
therefore a species—the most important species—of a "greenhouse gas."
Later,
in showing how Massachusetts as a landowner would suffer injury even though
global warming was widespread, Justice Stevens stated:
That these
climate-change risks are "widely shared" does not minimize
Massachusetts' interest in the outcome of this litigation. [citation omitted]. According
to petitioners' unchallenged affidavits, global sea levels rose somewhere
between 10 and 20 centimeters over the 20th century as a result of global
warming. MacCracken Decl. 5(c), Stdg.App. 208. These rising seas have already
begun to swallow Massachusetts' coastal land. Id., at 196 (declaration of Paul H. Kirshen 5), 216
(MacCracken Decl. 23). Because the Commonwealth "owns a substantial
portion of the state's coastal property," id., at 171 (declaration of Karst R. Hoogeboom 4),[citation
omitted] it has alleged a particularized injury in its capacity as a landowner.
The severity of that injury will only increase over the course of the next
century: If sea levels continue to rise as predicted, one Massachusetts
official believes that a significant fraction of coastal property will be
"either permanently lost through inundation or temporarily lost through
periodic storm surge and flooding events." Id., 6, at 172.[citation omitted]. Remediation costs alone,
petitioners allege, could run well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Id., 7, at 172; see also Kirshen
Decl. 12, at 198.[citation omitted]
While it is undeniable that greenhouse gases
can cause only harm, should this case be applicable when a state uses it to
invoke standing to challenge federal immigration policy? Texas, the lead
plaintiff in Texas v. United States,
argued that the President’s executive actions would cause a significant
economic burden as deferring removal of certain classes of non-citizens would allow
them to apply for drivers licenses,
which in turn would cost the state
several million dollars. Texas relied on this trifling economic burden as the
injury that would give it standing, which Judge Hanen accepted among other
standing legal theories. After providing standing, Judge Hanen temporarily
blocked the executive actions, and a trenchant criticism of his reasoning in
doing so can be found here.
Judge Hanen elaborated at great length
in equating the harm that Massachusetts would suffer through global warming with
the harm that Texas would suffer as a result of “500,000 illegal aliens that
enter the United States each year.” Judge Hanen went on to further expound his
views on the harms caused by illegal immigration, as follows:
The
federal government is unable or unwilling to police the border more thoroughly
or apprehend those illegal aliens residing within the United States; thus it is
unsurprising that, according to
prevailing estimates, there are somewhere between 11,000,000 and 12,000,000
illegal aliens currently living in the country, many of whom burden the limited
resources in each state to one extent or another. Indeed, in many instances,
the Government intentionally allows known illegal aliens to enter and remain in
the country.
While emphasizing the alleged harms that
undocumented immigration would cause to the states, Judge Hanen gave short
shrift to the well-reasoned amicus
brief of 12 states demonstrating
the overwhelming benefits that DAPA and DACA would confer to the states. Amici argued that the recipients of a prior
DACA program in 2012, which was not challenged in the litigation, caused 60% of
the recipients to find new jobs and that wages increased by over 240%. Allowing
immigrants to work legally and increase their wages substantially increases the
state tax base. The granting of deferred action also provides many social
benefits, amici argued, as it allows parents to support US citizen children,
thus reducing the cost of state social service benefits and it also allows families
to remain united. According to the
amicus brief, “When fit parents are deported, it can be difficult for the State
to find the parents and reunite them with their children. The existence of fit
parents – even if they have been deported – can also prevent the State from
seeking alternative placement options for a child, such as a guardianship or
adoption by another family member or third party.[citation omitted]. Deferred deportation
allows families to remain together, even if only temporarily.”The government appealed Judge Hanen’s preliminary injunction to the Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals. In a hearing before a panel in the Fifth Circuit to
lift the block while the government’s appeal was pending, Massachusetts v. EPA was again discussed, as presented in David Isaacson’s summary:
Continuing
with the standing discussion, Judge Smith directed AAG Mizer to the Supreme
Court’s decision in Massachusetts v.
EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), which he considered to be a key case on the
standing issue. Mizer responded, first, that there isn’t a territorial
effect in this case as in Massachusetts, where the state’s territory was being
affected (by rising sea levels resulting from global warming). Also, the
specific statute in Massachusetts v.
EPA gave a specific right to sue, while the INA, Mizer argued, “is not
enacted to protect the states”.
The success of the legal challenges to
President Obama’s executive actions hinges on whether courts will give
plaintiffs standing or not. In Crane
v. Johnson, the Fifth Circuit upheld the lower court’s finding that Mississippi,
a plaintiff, did not have standing as its claim to fiscal injury arising out of
deferral under the DACA 2012 program was speculative. More recently, a three judge panel in the D.C.
Circuit was skeptical of Arizona
sheriff Joe Arpaio’s challenge against DAPA and expanded DACA based on
standing. While they were skeptical that the deferred action programs will
result in more immigrants being detained in Maricopa County jails, one George
W. Bush appointee judge again cited
Massachusetts’ standing to sue to prevent environmental harm from greenhouse
gases by asking why “at least at the state level, isn’t concern about public
safety and crime and that sort of things costs and crime should not be at least
equal to the sovereignty concern to the sea level rise taking a few inches of
shoreline.”
Although the government has argued in its
appeal brief that the Clean Air Act gave a state such as Massachusetts the
right to sue while the INA does not in the context of deferred action and
prosecutorial discretion, a broader and more compelling argument can be made
against invoking Massachusetts v. EPA
in immigration litigation. Analogizing the ability of certain classes of
immigrants to temporarily remain in the United States to greenhouse gases is both
specious and offensive. It is well recognized that greenhouse gases only cause
harm, and thus a state impacted by them can readily demonstrate injury in order
to seek standing to sue the federal government. Immigrants, unlike greenhouse
gases, bring great benefits to the United States. Any manufactured claim of
harm by a state, like what Texas has claimed with the so called economic burden
caused by issuing driver’s license, is far outweighed by the benefits that
immigrants bring to this country. Apart from all the benefits that were
discussed by the states opposing the legal challenge, even a second grader can
figure out that handing out licenses to people who otherwise could not get it
before deferral ensures that many more will drive safely in the state of Texas.
One would also not use this analogy in other
contexts as it is highly offensive to link human beings to greenhouse gases. Imagine if a state were to challenge a federal
policy of providing federal benefits to same-sex married couples whose
marriages are valid where celebrated but not in the state of their residence,
on the basis that this policy led more same-sex married couples and their
families to reside in that state and thus overburden its schools and public
hospitals. If the state invoked Massachusetts
v. EPA, it would be viewed as highly offensive and also not a very strong
argument. Plaintiffs seem to be getting
away for the time being in linking immigrants to noxious pollutants, and it is
hoped that some judge will strike down this odious analogy so that it is no longer invoked in immigration litigation.
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