The chances that the Obama administration will revive the executive order taken by President Barack Obama in November 2014 to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation are unlikely to succeed. Experts are calling their attempt to get the Supreme Court to hear the case a second time “a long shot”.
On Monday, as the Republican national convention saw members rail against illegal immigration, the Justice Department requested that the Supreme Court rehear arguments over the administration’s right to grant work permits and defer the deportation of around a third of the approximately 12 million undocumented immigrants believed to live in the United States currently. The Supreme Court has been operating with only eight justices since the death of Antonin Scalia in February, and it deadlocked on the case four-four last month. This resulted in an injunction against the executive order made by a lower court remaining in place.
Acting Solicitor General, Ian Gershengown, has petitioned the court to rehear the case when there are nine full members on the bench again, with the Republican-controlled Senate refusing to take a vote on any nominee for the position until after the Presidential election in November.
Number USA director, Roy Beck, says that the petition is designed to resonate with Democrats as a last-ditch effort to demonstrate that the party tried everything it could to get the executive action to pass. Beck has described the President’s attempts to bypass Congress and create his own immigration laws as “a Constitutional crisis”.