WASHINGTON — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia today skewered President Obama for “lax” enforcement of US immigration laws, in a 22-page dissenting opinion to the ruling against most of Arizona’s immigration statute.
Scalia (pictured) railed at Obama’s new policy, which stops deportations of many young illegal aliens and the administration’s legal fight to stop Arizona from enforcing immigration laws on its own.
“To say, as the Court does, that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing applications of the Immigration Act that the President declines to enforce boggles the mind,” Scalia read in court from his dissenting opinion.
“Federal officials have been unable to remedy the [illegal immigration] problem and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so,” he continued. “Thousands of Arizona’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants — including not just children but men and women under 30 — are now assured immunity from enforcement and will be able to compete openly with Arizona citizens for employment.”
Scalia asked: “Must Arizona’s ability to protect its borders yield to the reality that Congress has provided inadequate funding for federal enforcement — or, even worse, to the executive’s unwise targeting of that funding?”
“What I do fear — and what Arizona and the States that support it fear — is that ‘federal policies’ of nonenforcement will leave the states helpless before those evil effects of illegal immigration,” he wrote.