President Barack Obama’s latest and boldest attempt to use his executive powers to grant quasi-legal status to illegal immigrants ran into a major road block late Monday as a federal judge in Texas barred the administration from going forward with plans for a major expansion of that drive.

The White House said early Tuesday that the Justice Department will appeal the decision handed down by U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen.


Acting on a lawsuit brought by 26 states, Hanen ruled that Obama lacked authority to carry out much of the initiative he announced in November to allow up to five million more illegal immigrants to obtain work permits and reprieves from deportation.

Obama and his aides have argued that the new drive was legally justified as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, since immigration authorities at the Department of Homeland Security lack the funding to deport more than a few percent of the 12 million people estimated to be in the U.S. illegally.

Hanen — an appointee of President George W. Bush — rejected that position.

“DHS does have discretion in the manner in which it chooses to fulfill the expressed will of Congress. It cannot, however, enact a program in which it not only ignores the dictates of Congress, but actively acts to thwart them,” Hanen wrote. “DHS Secretary [Jeh Johnson] is not just rewriting the laws he is creating them from scratch.”

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Hanen’s decision was at odds with Supreme Court precedents and laws giving immigration officials broad discretion in deciding whom to deport.

“The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that the federal government can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws — which is exactly what the president did when he announced commonsense policies to help fix our broken immigration system,” Earnest said. “Those policies are consistent with the laws passed by Congress and decisions of the Supreme Court, as well as five decades of precedent by presidents of both parties who have used their authority to set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws.”

Earnest also asserted that another federal judge in Washington ruled that Obama’s recent immigration actions were “well within his legal authority.” In that case, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell — an Obama appointee — ruled that a prominent Arizona sheriff lacked standing to challenge the new immigrations programs.

A motion to stay Hanen’s ruling could be filed Tuesday with the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. That court’s clerk’s office, based in New Orleans, is closed Tuesday for Mardi Gras. However, a statement on the 5th Circuit’s website said it will handle emergency matters.

Republicans have been sharply critical of Obama’s immigration actions, with many in Congress seeking to make future funding of the Department of Homeland Security contingent on an end to Obama’s immigration actions. That funding is set to expire at the end of this month.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who led the states’ lawsuit, hailed the ruling Monday night.

“Judge Hanen’s decision rightly stops the president’s overreach in its tracks,” Abbott said in a statement. “We live in a nation governed by a system of checks and balances, and the president’s attempt to bypass the will of the American people was successfully checked today.”

Pro-immigration groups called the ruling an aberration and vowed to have it overturned.

Marielena Hincapie of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant rights advocacy group that supports Obama’s actions, described the decision as “far outside the legal mainstream.”

“We are confident that the courts will ultimately side with the scores of legal experts, state leaders, city officials, and law enforcement leaders who say that these immigration initiatives are both in full compliance with law and deeply beneficial to our communities, society, and country,” she said in a statement.

The Texas judge’s ruling blocked both key parts of Obama’s new immigration initiative: the expansion of a program the president announced in 2012 to shield illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children and a new program giving similar “deferred action” status to illegal aliens who are parents of U.S. citizens or legal residents.

Hanen’s decision came just two days before officials were set to begin accepting applications for the newly expanded program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA.

However, the bulk of the court’s opinion focuses on the parents’ program, called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA. Officials were expected to begin accepting applications for that program by May, but no specific start date had been announced.

In the 1990s, three federal appeals courts rejected lawsuits states brought over federal authorities’ failure to adequately enforce immigration laws. One such suit was filed by the state of Texas and was rejected by the 5th Circuit.

However, Hanen said the current situation is different because the federal government is actually conferring a form of legal status on illegal immigrants and granting them work permits. That results in added costs to states, the judge said.

“This Court seriously doubts that the Supreme Court, in holding non-enforcement decisions to be presumptively unreviewable, anticipated that such non-enforcement decisions would include the affirmative act of bestowing multiple, otherwise unobtainable benefits upon an individual,” Hanen wrote. “The award of legal status and all that it entails is an impermissible refusal to follow the law.”

Despite the judge’s language, the issuance of work permits to individuals who lack permanent legal status in the country — such as people applying for asylum or who can’t be deported due to issues in their home countries — has long been a feature of the U.S. immigration system.

Obama administration officials have argued that the protections for children and for parents are both consistent with past administrations’ actions to shield family members from deportation and with congressional actions evincing a desire to keep families intact.

But Hanen said the new programs differed from past efforts in terms of their scope, since millions of people could be eligible. He also said the program for parents goes far beyond a mere decision to prioritize who’ll be deported and who won’t.

“DAPA does not represent mere inadequacy; it is complete abdication. … It is, in effect, a new law,” the judge wrote.

Hanen also held that the administration illegally shortcircuited federal law by instituting the DAPA program without the review-and-comment period required when federal agencies make major changes to their rules. He noted skeptically that a legal opinion the Justice Department made public last year in defense of the new initiative omitted any discussion of that issue.

The judge said his ruling does not apply to the DACA program Obama announced in 2012, but only to its planned expansion to cover older applicants and those who came to the U.S. as late as 2010.

While the judge’s decision halts policies many immigrants welcomed and a large number were preparing to apply for, Hanen argued that in blocking the new actions he was actually doing those immigrants a favor.

“There may be dire consequences for them if DAPA is later found to be unconstitutional. The DHS — whether under this administration or the next — will then have all pertinent identifying information for these immigrants and could deport them,” the judge warned.