Hillary Clinton: “I will go as far as I can, even beyond President Obama” with “Executive Action to Prevent Deportation”

October 27th, 2015

At the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Iowa, presumptive-nominee Hillary Clinton promised that she would go “beyond” President Obama’s “executive actions to prevent deportations.”

“I am going to back and support what President Obama has done to protect DREAMers and their families, to use executive action to prevent deportation,” Clinton said to applause. “And I have said that if we cannot get comprehensive immigration reform as we need, and as we should, with a real path to citizenship that will actually grow our economy — then I will go as far as I can, even beyond President Obama, to make sure law-abiding, decent, hard-working people in this country are not ripped away from their families.”

There is a problem here. The OLC Opinion used to justify the legality of DAPA effectively said it would be unconstitutional for the President to expand deferred action any more than he already did. One of the reasons the immigrant-rights community has been so critical of the DAPA memorandum is, that as broad as it is, it is restricting. Most pressingly, it did not provide deferred action to the parents of the dreamers. It did not provide deferred action to aliens without any relationship to a U.S. Citizen. If President Clinton’s OLC wants to go “beyond” the Obama OLC, it will have to repudiate, or at least ignore, portions of the 2014 opinion