Claim: Ken Paxton Says Barack Obama "acknowledged over 20 times" that his administration’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans "immigration edict was a violation of law and the separation of powers.
Verdict: REFUTES

Retrieved passages:
title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: President Barack Obama, along with a number of immigration reform steps including increased resources for border enforcement, new procedures for high-skilled immigrants, and an expansion of the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Several states have filed lawsuits against the federal government, arguing that DAPA violates the Constitution and federal statutes. A temporary injunction was issued in February 2015, blocking the program from going into effect while the lawsuit proceeds. A U.S. Supreme Court 4–4 split decision in June 2016 effectively left the block in place. On June 15, 2017, the Trump Administration announced that it was rescinding

title: Ken Paxton
text: New York Times", Obama's executive actions "would protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation and allow them to work indefinitely in the country legally." Paxton argued that the president should not be allowed to "unilaterally rewrite congressional laws and circumvent the people's representatives." The Supreme Court heard the case, "United States v. Texas", and issued a split 4-4 ruling in the case in June 2016. Because of the split ruling, a 2015 lower-court ruling invalidating Obama's plan was left in place. In July 2017, Paxton led a group of Republican Attorneys General and Idaho Governor Butch Otter in threatening the

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: one dissent. The divided circuit court affirmed the preliminary injunction and ordered the case back to the district court for trial. Judge Jerry Edwin Smith, joined by Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod agreed with the district court that Texas has standing because of the cost of issuing drivers licenses to aliens, and that President Obama’s order violated the rulemaking requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act. The majority made a new finding that the Immigration and Nationality Act “flatly does not permit” deferred action. Judge Carolyn Dineen King dissented, arguing that prosecutorial discretion makes the case non-justiciable, and that there had been

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: 1990 "Family Fairness" program. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson then released two memorandums directing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make aliens without criminal histories the lowest priority for removal, and to grant deferred action to illegal immigrants who are the parents of a U.S. citizens or lawful permanent resident. The President’s program, when combined with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, would have delayed deportation of slightly less than half of the 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. More than 10 million people in the United States reside in a household with at least one adult who

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans order. On June 27, 2013, the U.S. Senate’s Gang of Eight passed their comprehensive immigration reform bill in the Senate. When pressed to take unilateral executive action to limit deportations on Univision in March 2014, President Barack Obama replied “until Congress passes a new law, then I am constrained in terms of what I am able to do.” On June 9, 2014, House Whip Kevin McCarthy announced that House Republicans had enough votes to pass the bill. However, the next day House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary election, so on June

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: 30, Speaker John Boehner announced that he would not bring the bill to a vote. That same day, President Obama delivered remarks in the White House Rose Garden promising to “fix as much of our immigration system as I can on my own, without Congress.” Over the next eight months the Obama Administration went through sixty iterations of different possible executive actions. Finally, on November 20, 2014, President Obama delivered a primetime televised address to the nation announcing DAPA. The Office of Legal Counsel advised that the program was constitutional, finding it was similar to President George H. W. Bush’s

title: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
text: the Rose Garden of the White House on June 15, 2012. The date was chosen as the 30th anniversary of "Plyler v. Doe", a Supreme Court decision barring public schools from charging illegal immigrant children tuition. The policy was officially established by a memorandum from the Secretary of Homeland Security titled "Exercising Prosecutorial Discretion with Respect to Individuals Who Came to the United States as Children". This policy allowed certain immigrants to escape deportation and obtain work permits for a period of two years—renewable upon good behavior. To apply, immigrants had to be younger than 31 on June 15, 2012,

title: Immigration reform in the United States
text: has requested additional funding for screening and deportation, and tougher penalties on smugglers. Arrivals of children at the U.S. borders slowed from in August 2014, compared to May and June. On November 20, 2014, in a televised address from the White House, President Barack Obama announced a program of "deferred action" which would allow roughly 45% of illegal immigrants to legally stay and work in the United States. The largest prior deferral action, in 1990, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, affected 40% of undocumented immigrants then. Up to 3.7 million undocumented parents of individuals who are U.S.

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: United States" proceeds. The Obama Administration appealed the order for a preliminary injunction and asked the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans to stay the district court's injunction pending appeal. On May 26, 2015, the administration's motion for a stay was denied by a three member motions panel with one dissent, meaning that the government could not implement DAPA until the Fifth Circuit ruled on the appeal of the injunction order itself. That ruling came on November 9, 2015, with a three-member panel of the Fifth Circuit affirming the district court's preliminary injunction, with

title: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
text: 2014 by Texas and 25 other states—all with Republican governors. The group of states sued to enjoin the implementation of the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA)—another immigration policy—and the DACA expansions announced by the Obama administration. In the lawsuit, the states claimed that, by expanding DACA, the president failed to enforce the nation's immigration laws in contravention to Article Two of the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, the states claimed that the president unilaterally rewrote the law through his actions. As part of the judicial process, in February 2015, Judge Andrew S. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction blocking the expansion

title: Ken Paxton
text: Donald J. Trump administration that they would litigate if the president did not terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy that had been put into place by president Barack Obama. The other Attorneys General who joined in making the threats to Trump included Steve Marshall of Alabama, Leslie Rutledge of Arkansas, Lawrence Wasden of Idaho, Derek Schmidt of Kansas, Jeff Landry of Louisiana, Doug Peterson of Nebraska, Alan Wilson of South Carolina, and Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia. In 2017, Paxton voiced support for the application of eminent domain to obtain right-of-way along the Rio Grande in Texas for

title: Ken Paxton
text: Trump's first and second executive orders on travel and immigration. In filings in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court, Paxton argued that the order—which places a 90-day ban on the issuance of visas to traveled from six designated majority-Muslim countries, imposes a 120-day halt on the admission of refugees to the U.S., and caps annual refugee admissions to 50,000 people—is constitutionally and legally valid. In May 2017, Paxton filed a preemptive lawsuit designed to ascertain the constitutionality of the new Texas ban on sanctuary

title: Trump administration family separation policy
text: 528 of the children — about a fifth — have still not been reunited with their parents. President George W. Bush began the trend of a "zero tolerance" approach in 2005 with Operation Streamline, but during his administration, exceptions were generally made for adults traveling with minors. U.S. President Barack Obama made changes to immigration policy, releasing parents and focusing on deportation of immigrants who committed crimes in the U.S. Attempting to cope with the 2014 American immigration crisis, a surge of refugees fleeing violence in Central America, while complying with the 1997 Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement consent decree

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), sometimes called Deferred Action for Parental Accountability, was a planned American immigration policy to grant deferred action status to certain illegal immigrants who have lived in the United States since 2010 and have children who are either American citizens or lawful permanent residents. Deferred action is not full legal status but would come with a three-year, renewable work permit and exemption from deportation. DAPA was a presidential executive action, not a law passed by Congress. The program was announced in November 2014 by

title: Deferred Action for Parents of Americans
text: Los Angeles and Orange in California, Harris and Dallas in Texas, and Cook in Illinois. The President’s program, when combined with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, would have delayed deportation of slightly less than half of the 11 million illegal aliens in the United States. More than 10 million people in the United States reside in a household with at least one adult who would have been eligible for DAPA, with two thirds of those adults having lived in the United States for 10 years or more. Over half the illegal aliens eligible for the President’s delayed deportation live in

title: Priority Enforcement Program
text: memos built on earlier guidelines on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion, but went further by providing more explicit enforcement priorities, and explicitly telling ICE agents "not" to pursue some classes of removable aliens in order to focus on other ones. The memos were complemented by executive action by President Barack Obama in June 2012 on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allowed people who had arrived in the United States as young children to defer their removal and made it possible for them to apply for employment authorization documents. Note that whereas the Morton memos were addressed to ICE

title: Priority Enforcement Program
text: asking it "not" to prosecute some classes of removable aliens, the June 2012 executive action involved creating an affirmative program, managed by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), to which some aliens could apply. In November 2014, a number of announcements were made by the administration of then United States president Barack Obama surrounding changes to immigration enforcement. The most famous of these announcements was Deferred Action for Parents of Americans (DAPA). Like DACA, the goal of DAPA was to create an affirmative program (under USCIS) that some removable aliens could apply to in order to have their removal

title: Immigration policy of Donald Trump
text: dictates, even without authorization from Congress. The circumvention of Congress makes the order a threat to separation of powers, as well." On April 25, 2017, U.S. District Judge William Orrick issued a nationwide preliminary injunction halting the executive order. Subsequently, Judge Orrick issued a nationwide permanent injunction on November 20, 2017, declaring that section 9(a) of Executive Order 13768 was "unconstitutional on its face" and violates "the separation of powers doctrine and deprives [the plaintiffs] of their Tenth and Fifth Amendment rights." President Obama's "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" (DACA) Executive Order from 2012 enabled an estimated 800,000 young adults

title: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
text: the policy was a lawful exercise of the enforcement discretion that Congress delegated to the executive branch in the Immigration and Nationality Act, which charges the executive with the administration and enforcement of the country's immigration laws. Conversely, Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, opined that DACA was unlawful by asserting that it unconstitutionally usurped Congress' role over immigration by illegally allowing certain classes of illegal aliens to violate U.S. immigration law with impunity. On May 1, 2018, a coalition of 7 States, led by Texas, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the

title: Ken Paxton
text: court filings that the Obama administration had "conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment" and termed the directive a "gun to the head" that threatens the independence of school districts. The states dropped the suit after the directive was revoked by President Donald Trump. Paxton is involved in a legal challenge to a rule by the Department of Labor which forces employers to report any "actions, conduct or communications" undertaken to "affect an employee's decisions regarding his or her representation or collective bargaining rights." Known as the "Persuader Rule," the