States File Suit On Immigration

AUSTIN, Tex. — Texas and 16 other states filed a federal lawsuit on Wednesday challenging President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, arguing that he violated his constitutional duty to enforce the laws and illegally placed new burdens on state budgets.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Brownsville, Tex., was the first major legal challenge to initiatives Mr. Obama announced Nov. 20 that will provide protection from deportation and work permits to up to five million immigrants in the country illegally.

Attorney General Greg Abbott of Texas, which led the coalition bringing the challenge, said Mr. Obama was “abdicating his responsibility to faithfully enforce the laws that were duly enacted by Congress and attempting to rewrite immigration laws, which he has no authority to do.”

The suit added to the broadside by angry Republicans against Mr. Obama’s unilateral actions. In Washington, Republicans in the House of Representatives moved toward holding a largely symbolic vote on Thursday on a bill to dismantle the president’s programs, with a plan to vote next week on a spending bill that could fund the Department of Homeland Security, the agency administering the new programs, for only a few months.

The states’ lawsuit also argued that the Obama administration had failed to comply with requirements the federal government must follow in issuing new rules, and warned that Mr. Obama’s measures would encourage a new wave of illegal crossings at the Southwest border, forcing Texas and other states to spend additional funds on law enforcement, health care and education.

Mr. Obama and other senior officials have said that they have full legal authority for the new measures, which they said are authorized by existing statutes. Mr. Obama granted deferred deportations, at the discretion of prosecutors, to undocumented immigrants who are parents of American citizens and legal permanent residents.

“The Supreme Court and Congress have made clear that federal officials can set priorities in enforcing our immigration laws, and we are confident that the president’s executive actions are well within his legal authorities," Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the White House, said Wednesday after the lawsuit was filed.

In presenting the lawsuit at a news conference, Mr. Abbott said Texas was “uniquely qualified to challenge the president’s executive order” because the state had suffered the brunt of illegal immigration and drug-related cross-border crime. Mr. Abbott said the president’s responsibility to enforce the laws was a “fundamental promise to the American people,” and he said any changes to immigration laws should be made by Congress, not by “presidential fiat.”

Mr. Abbott, a Republican, will replace Rick Perry as Texas governor in January after winning in a landslide in November. Mr. Perry, the state’s longest-serving governor, joined a one-two punch against Mr. Obama on Wednesday from a pair of conservative Texas Republicans who have repeatedly attacked the administration on immigration and other issues.

At a separate news conference here, Mr. Perry described heavy spending by Texas on state operations to reinforce border security, and he accused the Obama administration of ignoring the border “in favor of political posturing on immigration.”

Mr. Obama’s actions had the effect of placing a “neon sign on our border, assuring people they can ignore the law” and come into the United States illegally, Mr. Perry said. He called on Congress to pass legislation providing new funds for border enforcement before any broader overhaul of the immigration laws. Republicans will control both houses of Congress next year.

Mr. Perry signed an executive order requiring all state agencies to use a federal electronic system, known as E-Verify, to check the employment eligibility of current state workers and future hires. The system detects immigrants who are not legally authorized to work.

States joining the lawsuit were Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Mississippi and Maine.

The states’ lawsuit argues that the surge of illegal crossings by families and unaccompanied children over the summer was spurred by a program Mr. Obama started in 2012, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gave deportation protections similar to the new ones to undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. The suit said federal authorities “have contributed to the surge of illegal immigration by refusing to enforce the laws on the books.”

The new directives are “certain to trigger a new wave of undocumented immigration,” the lawsuit says, imposing “enormous law enforcement costs.” Texas said it was spending an extra $1.3 million a week on troopers and other resources.

For Mr. Abbott, who has been Texas’ attorney general since 2002, the multistate lawsuit was his 31st legal challenge against the Obama administration and his 34th against the federal government.

"I go into the office, I sue the federal government and I go home," Mr. Abbott has told audiences at public events and political rallies. But with being joined by other states, Mr. Abbott’s new lawsuit seemed likely to become a primary vehicle for Republicans’ efforts to halt Mr. Obama’s immigration actions through the courts.

Legal experts are sharply divided over whether Mr. Obama has overstepped his constitutional bounds. At a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Thomas H. Dupree Jr., a partner in the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, said the president was “attempting to write into law what Congress deliberately chose not to write into law.”

Mr. Dupree warned, “If the president may use executive authority to simply ignore laws that he does not like, then it will be possible for future presidents to unilaterally revise everything from federal criminal law to tax law to environmental law and beyond.”

But in an open letter, four lawyers who formerly served as general counsel to the immigration agency that will run the new programs said their “collective view” was that Mr. Obama was “well within his legal authority.”