The Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared likely to side with the Trump administration in its effort to end a program that lets nearly 700,000 young, undocumented immigrants live and work in the USA without fear of deportation, according to a USA Today report.

Several conservative justices noted the Department of Homeland Security laid out several reasons for its decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.

The court’s four liberal justices argued that the decision to end DACA should rise or fall on the administration’s tenuous claim that it was illegal.

“Chief Justice John Roberts looked to be the key vote, as he was in June when he voted with the court’s four liberal justices to strike down the Trump administration’s effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census,” USA Today‘s Richard Wolf writes.

Read the USA Today article.

Senators from both parties criticized a nominee for a federal appeals court for declining to answer questions Wednesday about his work in the Trump White House and Education Department, according to an Associated Press report.

Trump has nominated Steven Menashi, an associate White House counsel, to a seat on the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Senators from both parties at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing complained as Menashi refused to answer questions about his work on immigration issues, including a policy to separate migrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“This isn’t supposed to be a game,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., told Menashi.

Read the AP report.

The company that was the target in a sweep of workers allegedly living in the country illegally had a history of “knowingly hiring and employing illegal aliens,”  according to allegations in an unsealed affidavit for a federal search warrant.

The Chicago Tribune reports that “Six of seven Mississippi chicken processing plants raided were ‘willfully and unlawfully’ employing people who lacked authorization to work in the United States, including workers wearing electronic monitoring bracelets at work for previous immigration violations, the affidavit alleges.”

The sworn statements supported the search warrants that led a judge to authorize the raids, and aren’t official charges.

A spokesman for the company, Koch Foods, denied that the company knowingly or willfully employed any unauthorized workers at its Morton, Miss., plant.

Read the Chicago Tribune article.

The Associated Press is reporting that sworn statements supporting search warrants allege that six of seven Mississippi chicken processing plants raided last week were “willfully and unlawfully” employing people who lacked authorization to work in the United States.

Some of the workers were wearing electronic monitoring bracelets at work for previous immigration violations, according to unsealed court documents.

“The statements unsealed Thursday allege that managers at two processing plants owned by the same Chinese man actively participated in fraud,” writes the AP’s Jeff Amy. “They also show that supervisors at other plants at least turned a blind eye to evidence strongly suggesting job applicants were using fraudulent documents and bogus Social Security numbers.”

Read the AP article.

The general counsel of a Minnesota think tank has been suspended for comments she made about Somali-Americans in a New York Times article, reports the Twin Cities Pioneer Press.

The article with the comments from Kim Crockett, vice president and general counsel of the conservative Center of the American Experiment, examined the resistance to refugee resettlement in St. Cloud.

The following day, the Golden Valley-based organization announced that Crockett had been placed on an unpaid 30-day disciplinary suspension and said in a statement that her comments do not reflect its “views and values.”

Read the Pioneer Press article.

Politico reports that the Justice Department placed an online job posting for a pair of attorneys to tackle border wall litigation in South Texas — a sign of coming property seizures and other legal controversies that President Donald Trump anticipates if he plows ahead with his signature project.

Politico’s Ted Hesson interviewed Chris Rickerd, the American Civil Liberties Union’s senior policy counsel on border and immigration issues, who said the attorneys likely will deal with eminent domain property seizures and quarrels with landowners over what their land is worth.

The two advertised jobs, based in McAllen and Brownsville, will pay between $53,062 and $138,790, according to a posting to a federal jobs website.

Read the Politico article.

Image by U.S. Customs and Border Protection

Government lawyers have taken the first step in trying to seize private property using the power of eminent domain to build a border wall — a contentious step that could put a lengthy legal wrinkle into President Trump’s plans to build hundreds of miles of wall, reports The Washington Post.

Previous eminent domain attempts along the Texas border have led to more than a decade of court battles, some of which date to George W. Bush’s administration and have yet to be resolved, according to the Post‘s Katie Zezima and Mark Berman. Many landowners are vowing to fight anew.

The reporters quoted Gerald S. Dickinson, an assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh, who said this newest fight will be different because the earlier effort mostly included federal government land.

“If it’s going to be a contiguous wall across the entire southwest border, you’re talking about a massive land seizure of private property,” he said.

Read the Post article.

A growing number of lawyers, interpreters and other professionals across the U.S. — members of Lawyers for Good Government — have mobilized to force the Trump Administration to defend its immigration policies in court.

Bloomberg reports that the organization, which was launched as a Facebook group the day after Trump was elected president, is working on behalf of people who have been detained after they sought asylum for themselves and their children because they said they feared for their lives in their home countries.

Reporter Nick Leiber writes that “L4GG has only one employee: founder, president, and executive director Traci Feit Love, a Harvard Law School graduate and former litigator for DLA Piper, one of the biggest law firms in the world. She and her board have been figuring out how to direct L4GG’s volunteers—a significant chunk of the 1.34 million attorneys in the U.S.—to make them useful.”

Read the Bloomberg article.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed a victory to President Trump after the high court upheld the third version of his travel ban in a 5-4 vote, barring almost all travelers from five Muslim countries, North Korea and government officials from Venezuela.

“This is a big win for President Trump,” says Dallas appellate attorney David Coale in a post on the website of Androvett Legal Media & Marketing. “The decision signals that so long as the president is acting in an area of traditional executive power, in a facially neutral way with regards to religion, he has a lot of power. This signals how things may go in later immigration litigation about border policy.”

Coale adds that the latest ruling is different from another immigration hot button involving asylum.

“This dispute turned on the force of a law about visas. The current immigration dispute involves asylum requests, which is a different set of statutes. So this case does not apply directly, but it does provide a road map for future litigation by making analogies to these laws.

“Both the majority and Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent note the system of waivers and exemptions built into the president’s order. The majority says it shows that the order was drafted carefully; the dissent says that if the waivers and exemptions are not actually used, that can justify a challenge to the statute. So that may be the next round of litigation about these matters – whether the waivers and exemptions are in fact being applied as written.

“Also,” he noted, “the majority signals that it isn’t particularly interested in presidential ‘tweets.’ It mentioned them, but basically said they were not relevant to the legal issue at hand.”

The U.S. Supreme Court, winding down its nine-month term, will issue rulings this week in its few remaining cases including a major one on the legality of President Donald Trump’s ban on people from five Muslim-majority nations entering the country, reports Reuters.

“The nine justices are due to decide other politically sensitive cases on whether non-union workers have to pay fees to unions representing certain public-sector workers such as police and teachers, and the legality of California regulations on clinics that steer women with unplanned pregnancies away from abortion,” write Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung.

On the subject of collecting fees for union from non-members, the court’s conservatives indicated opposition during arguments on Feb. 26 to so-called agency fees that some states require non-members to pay to public-sector unions.

Read the Reuters article.

Image by Rhododendrites

Reuters is reporting that President Donald Trump on Wednesday blasted the U.S. court system as “broken and unfair” after a federal judge blocked his move to end the program protecting young immigrants brought to the United States illegally by their parents, commonly known as “Dreamers.”

He was responding to a Tuesday ruling by U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco that DACA must remain in place while the litigation is resolved.

In a post on Twitter on Wednesday morning, Trump wrote, “It just shows everyone how broken and unfair our Court System is when the opposing side in a case (such as DACA) always runs to the 9th Circuit and almost always wins before being reversed by higher courts.”

Read the Reuters article.

A Ninth Circuit ruling on President Trump’s “travel ban” case offers the U.S. Supreme Court a clever way to reject the ban without limiting government power over immigration, writes Garrett Epps for The Atlantic.

The court does not question the statute that the administration relies on as the basis for the travel bans, but it denies that the bans conform to it.

Epps explains that “a travel ban is perfectly possible, and the administration is always free to ask Congress for one. Had it done so in January, Congress might have enacted one by now. The Supreme Court may be concerned that a decision against the government in this case may weaken the nation; the Ninth Circuit opinion suggests a way to avoid doing so—while still rejecting Trump’s demand for personal powers that ‘will not be questioned.’”

Read The Atlantic‘s article.

A tree trimming company has been handed the largest penalty imposed in a United States immigration case, totaling $95 million, after pleading guilty to employing illegal immigrants, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

Reuters reports that Asplundh Tree Experts Co., which trims trees and clears brush for power and gas lines across the country, hired employees who provided fake identification documents from 2010 to 2014, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia said.

The prosecutor said the company’s managers were “willfully blind” as supervisors and foremen hired illegal immigrants, writes Brendan O’Brien.

Read the Reuters article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

President Donald Trump’s travel ban offers the Supreme Court the chance to make a major pronouncement on the president’s power over immigration. But the case also could vanish into the legal ether, and that may be what a majority of the court is hoping for, points out Associated Press reporter Mark Sherman.

“Getting rid of the case would allow the justices to avoid second-guessing the president on a matter of national security or endorsing an especially controversial part of Trump’s agenda,” Sherman writes.

The timing of the ban could help the justices avoid a showdown because the 90-day travel ban on visitors from six mostly Muslim countries will expire before the court will hear the challenge.

Read the AP article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

The New York Times published a collection of reaction from some top business leaders and companies who expressed their disapproval of President Trump’s  decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, tweeted that his company would fight for the people affected by Trump’s action to be “treated as equals.”

Reporter Zach Wichter writes that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg said the announcement marks “a sad day for our country.”

Roger A. Iger, chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Co., tweeted: “Rescinding DACA is cruel and misguided. Dreamers contribute to our economy and our nation.”

Read the NYT article.

Image by Daniella Urdinlaiz

The only large U.S. law firm in the country dedicated solely to immigration work is in crisis management mode in the wake of President Donald Trump’s immigration order, reports Bloomberg Law.

Blake Chisam, chief audit and privacy officer at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy, said the firm has started using two telephone briefings every day to alert partners about administrative issues, news updates, unsettled legal issues and upcoming risks. The firm has about 550 lawyers across the world, many of them gathering information as the situation unfolds.

The report says “Fragomen has helped clients draft letters to their board, briefed upset executives for meetings with the President, and even sued the Trump administration on behalf of a CNN journalist detained at the Atlanta airport. The firm’s attorneys have also jumped in on a pro bono basis to help travelers, visa and green card holders facing deportation and uncertainty.”

Read the Bloomberg article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

Image by Adam Tinworth

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick responded to an onslaught of criticism to his joining President Trump’s economic advisory council by resigning from the council on Thursday, reports The New York Times.

The criticism came both from people outside the company and from Uber employees, explains reporter Mike Issac.

First, the company took heat from the public after the company appeared to be profiting from business generated during New York protests of Trump’s immigration order. Then Kalanick had to face direct criticism from his employees, who wondered why he was willing to advise the president.

“Outside of the internal pressure, Uber faced other fallout from Mr. Kalanick’s stance. More than 200,000 customers had deleted their accounts,” Issac writes.

Read the Times article.

Scholars interviewed by The Washington Post say that President Trump’s executive order on immigration is likely to face a series of new legal challenges about whether it violates a 1965 anti-discrimination law and the Constitution, the newspaper reports.

Four federal judges have put various holds on the ban, and 16 state attorneys general have said they believe the executive order is unconstitutional.

Ruthann Robson, professor of law at City University of New York School of Law, said the order could be thrown out on grounds that it violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. “She noted that courts have criticized governmental distinctions based on ancestry and race, write Michael Kranish and Robert Barnes.

Read the Washington Post article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group

A Dallas constitutional law attorney says President Trump’s temporary ban on immigrants and refugees at airports nationwide is extreme, but not without historical precedent, according to a post published by Androvett Legal Media & Marketing.

Issued Friday, the executive order prevents citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States for three months. He also placed the U.S. refugee program on hold for four months. The order launched massive protests at airports in major cities across the country and brought attorneys together to offer free legal support to detained travelers.

But attorney David Coale of Lynn Pinker Cox Hurst says that presidents have conducted similar actions in the past:

“There is a very broad 1952 statute that lets the president suspend entry by classes of aliens for security reasons. But a 1965 statute imposes anti-discrimination limits on the executive branch in how it implements immigration policy. But beyond that, there is not a lot of case law to go. More modest bans have been allowed by courts, but with caveats that indicate they were thinking about a possibility such as this. Jimmy Carter did something vaguely like it in 1980 during the Iran crisis by requiring Iranians here on student visas to report to immigration officials, but it is a big leap from his limited action to this one. I think that once the temporary ban ends, however, the ‘extreme vetting’ in the current order will be DOA. The First Amendment prohibits government action that favors one religion over another, and the current executive order clearly does so by giving non-Muslims priority status.”

Donald Trump’s executive order Friday banning citizens of certain countries from entering the U.S. for 90 days blindsided the technology industry, reports The Los Angeles Times.

Reporter Tracey Lien writes that the industry had thought that its main battle on the immigration front was over the number of H-1B visas — granted to high-skilled foreign workers — that will be made available each year.

But now lawyers are fielding calls from worried tech workers with visas and green cards. And they’re having to adjust their advice to those clients as each day’s news comes out.

“For those abroad, we are telling them to come back as soon as possible, and be prepared to face questioning and possible refusal,” Los Angeles immigration attorney Ayda Akalin said.

Read the Los Angeles Times article.

Join Our LinkedIn Group