USA Today Reporter: Obama’s Authority to Grant Work Permits Untested

USA Today immigration and Latin America reporter Alan Gomez said that the president’s legal authority to give work permits through an executive order was “murky” and “something that really hasn’t been tested” on Friday’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC.

“He [Obama] created the deferred action for new arrivals where he allowed undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children to register with the federal government and be allowed to stay here, to be protected from deportation, that’s about 580,000 young undocumented immigrants have been approved from that program so far. Now, the argument is that he can pretty much expand that, continue protecting undocumented immigrants while still carrying out the laws of Congress…but it gets into a lot murkier ground when he starts talking about granting work permits. And this is one of the things that we’re going to be hearing quite a bit about in this Republican Senate in these next couple of weeks, is that next step of allowing them to work. He’s not going to try to give them citizenship as you said, but it’s, the legal ground on which he’s standing to provide work permits is something that really hasn’t been tested and it’s something that’s a lot more difficult to understand” he stated.

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