Obama slams 'frustrating,' 'heartbreaking' Supreme Court immigration decision

Responding to the Supreme Court tie blocked his immigration actions on Tuesday, President Barack Obama matter-of-factly delivered a sweeping rebuke of Congressional gridlock, Donald Trump and anti-immigrant sentiment as he challenged voters to take on all three of those phenomena in November.

The more than five million longtime undocumented immigrants hoping for relief will have to look to the next administration for legal status, a "frustrating" and “heartbreaking” setback, President Barack Obama said. But does it does little to change the status quo now, and that’s why voters have to make changes in November, he said – and not the fantasy changes offered by Donald Trump.


"I believe that this country deserves an immigration policy that reflects the goodness of the American people, and I think we're going to get that,” Obama told reporters on Thursday. “Hopefully we're going to get that in November."

Obama’s face pinched in irritation when a reporter cited Republicans crowing that the ruling was a “slap” at his use of executive authority, and he rejected the suggestion that a “one-word opinion” represented any sort of “value standing.”

That wasn’t how top Republicans saw it. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for example, said the ruling “vindicated” the separation of powers in the Constitution.

“The president is not permitted to write laws -- only Congress is,” Ryan said in a statement. “This is another major victory in our fight to restore the separation of powers."

Instead, the president insisted, the 4-4 ruling is the ultimate result of Republican-driven gridlock, a combination of Congress’s inability to pass comprehensive immigration reform and its refusal to confirm his tie-breaking Supreme Court nominee. With the court and the Congress punting, the fates of longtime undocumented immigrants – and America’s values – are in voters’ hands.

“Now we’ve got a choice about who we’re going to be as a country,” Obama said.

“We’re going to have to decide if we’re a people who tolerate the hypocrisy of the system where the workers who pick our fruit or make our beds are going to never have a chance to get right with the law,” he said. Same goes for whether “we're a people who accept the cruelty of ripping children from their parents’ arms,” or “educate the world’s brightest students” only to send them away to “compete with us.”

He continued, “These are all the questions that voters are now going to have to ask themselves and are going to have to answer in November.”

Obama also lashed out at Republican anti-immigration hardliners and Trump, though he did not utter any names as he accused them of election-year scaremongering with terms like “amnesty.”

“The real amnesty,” Obama said, is “pretending that we can deport 11 million people or build a wall without spending tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money is abetting what is really factually incorrect."

"It's not going to work," Obama said. " It's not good for this country. It's a fantasy that offers nothing to help the middle class and demeans our tradition of being both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. In the end, it is my firm belief that immigration is not something to fear. We don't have to wall ourselves off from those who may not look like us right now or pray like we do or have a different last name because being an American is about something more than that. What makes us Americans are shared commitment to an ideal that all of us are created equal, all of us have a chance to make of our lives what we will."

The 4-4 tie between the justices leaves in place a lower court order that prohibited Obama from launching a new program, proposed in the wake of his party’s midterm losses in 2014, to grant “deferred action” status to undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens or those green card holders.

That deadlock, Obama said, “is part of the consequence of the Republican failure to give a fair hearing to Mr. Merrick Garland, my nominee to the Supreme Court.”

While Garland would not likely have ascended to the bench in time to participate in this case under any circumstances, it was a reminder for both sides what’s at stake in the Supreme Court fight.

Had Justice Antonin Scalia been alive, he would have likely sided with the conservatives, potentially delivering a more far-reaching rebuke of executive over-reach. A liberal on the court would have cleared the administration’s path.

Instead, the ruling ends only Obama’s efforts; he acknowledged that he's out of executive-branch options. Hillary Clinton has criticized the Supreme Court ruling and pledged to go even further than Obama with executive actions to help undocumented immigrants. If she becomes president, she can choose to renew her predecessor’s legal push.

For now, Obama said, nothing much changes. A lower court had blocked his administration from even implementing the 2014 executive order. But the people who would have been eligible “will remain low priorities for enforcement,” Obama said. “As long as you have not committed a crime, our limited enforcement resources are not focused on you.”

He added that his 2012 order, which made the so-called “Dreamers” brought into the United States unlawfully as children eligible for deferred status, still stands.

Obama maintained that his 2014 actions were within his authority, and his Constitutional law professor persona was dominant at the podium. But he did grow more impassioned as he made an appeal for compassion.

"We get these spasms of politics around immigration, and fear-mongering. And then our traditions and our history and our history our better impulses kick in. That's how we all ended up here. Because I guarantee you,” Obama said, gesticulating toward the reporters assembled for the hastily-planned statement, “at some point every one of us has somebody in our background who people didn't want coming here. And yet here we are."

Whether comprehensive immigration reform will happen “now, soon, so that this does not continue to be this divisive force in our politics,” Obama said, is “going to be determined in part by how voters turn out and who they vote for in November."

Immigrant advocacy groups echoed his message. While they’d been gearing up for a surge of interest from immigrants applying for deferred status, advocates said they were planning to just divert those resources to naturalization, voter registration and turnout efforts if the court blocked it.

“We know that the future of immigration reform will no longer be decided by politics or by the courts,” said Voto Latino president and CEO Maria Teresa Kumar, in a statement. “Instead, it will be decided by the more than 1.6 million Latino voters directly impacted by today’s decision, and the millions of voters who aspire for a just immigration system.”

Obama also offered praise for the court's upholding the affirmative action program at the University of Texas.

