Azernews.Az

By Bloomberg

The Obama administration urged a judge, who last year accused it of complicity in cross-border child smuggling, to reject efforts by a 25-state coalition to block a White House order allowing about 4 million undocumented immigrants to stay in the U.S.

Government lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen of Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border, to refuse the states’ call to delay President Barack Obama’s program until their challenge is decided.

Hanen may prove a tough sell for the Obama administration. The judge blasted the Department of Homeland Security last year for failing to enforce U.S. immigration laws and turning “a blind eye to criminal conduct.”

Hanen, who was appointed by Republican George W. Bush in 2002, rebuked the agency for “completing the criminal conspiracy” by delivering undocumented children caught at the border to their parents living illegally in the U.S. The judge complained in a December 2013 opinion that the undocumented parents weren’t arrested or deported after being reunited with their kids, and taxpayers were footing the transit bills.

The biggest beneficiaries of the conspiracy, Hanen said, are the Mexican drug cartels that control the border smuggling rings, who’ve learned to rely on the U.S. government to “finish the job of the human traffickers” if they get caught.

Help Violators

“Instead of enforcing the law of the United States, the government took direct steps to help the individuals who violated it,” Hanen wrote in his opinion a year ago that followed a string of child-trafficking convictions in his court. “A private citizen would, and should, be prosecuted for this conduct.”

In the middle of the 10-page opinion, Hanen said he “takes no position on the topic of immigration reform” and his opinion shouldn’t be read as a commentary on a “matter of much political debate.” He went on to assail Department of Homeland Security policies, alternately calling them “dangerous” and “failing.”

Humanitarian Crisis

Texas, which is leading the multistate challenge to Obama’s immigration policy, chose to file its case in the state’s southernmost tip. Brownsville has a front-row seat at the “humanitarian crisis” that has swept more than 1,000 undocumented immigrants a day -– many of them unaccompanied children -- across Texas’s border in the past year, according to the complaint.

Brownsville has just two federal judges -- Hanen and an appointee of Democratic ex-President Bill Clinton -- and they evenly split all incoming civil cases, according to the court’s website and a courthouse clerk who confirmed the case-assignment protocol but declined to give her name.

“The assignments are random” between Hanen and the other judge, Lauren Bean, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general’s office, said in an e-mailed response to questions on how Texas decided where to file the case.

“Texas is uniquely qualified to challenge the president’s executive order, and south Texas is at the epicenter of where border security is of concern for Texas and the entire nation,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who was elected governor in November, said at a Dec. 3 press conference about the litigation.

The case is State of Texas v. U.S., 1:14-254, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas (Brownsville).