Article snippet: Barack Obama told the American people for three years that the Constitution and federal law did not allow him to grant amnesty for illegal aliens, that amnesty could only be authorized by Congress. In Article I, Section 8, Clause 4, the Constitution grants Congress plenary power over immigration. After years of failing to get even a Democrat-controlled Congress to enact amnesty Barack Obama in 2012 announced a form of amnesty for illegal aliens who had entered the country as children. Then-Secretary Janet Napolitano of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a memorandum to DHS personnel mandating that they not enforce immigration law for over 400,000 illegal aliens, creating a form of amnesty. This program was called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, commonly known as DACA. In 2014, Obama expanded that amnesty to cover over 1 million adults under the similarly named program, DAPA, bringing the total number of noncitizens receiving amnesty from deportation to roughly 1.5 million. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton led a coalition of over a dozen states in a challenge against DAPA, arguing that the amnesty program violated (1) the Administrative Procedure Act’s (APA) requirements for public notice and comment, (2) could not be reconciled with Congress’s Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), and (3) the Take Care Clause of the Constitution. In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit struck down DAPA, holding that DAPA violated APA’s not... Link to the full article to read more