NewsBusters has long maintained that immigration is the issue that brings out the most egregious bias from the New York Times. As a significant case comes before an evenly split Supreme Court, the Times set the table with a collection of liberal clichés on Saturday. Reporters Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, both with a long pattern of sympathy toward Obama, fretted over whether the president could "redeem his legacy" on immigration through amnesty in “Ruling May Change Immigration, Not the Tone -- Justice’s Decision Is Unlikely to Ease the Debate.”
Inside the Supreme Court’s chambers on Monday, eight justices will consider whether President Obama abused the power of his office by issuing executive actions to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to work in the country legally and protect them from deportation.
Regardless of how the justices answer that question, their ruling is certain to inflame the volatile immigration debate in the 2016 presidential campaign. The decision will also help determine whether Mr. Obama has a chance to redeem his legacy on immigration, or see it marred beyond repair.
For the Times, for Obama to “redeem his legacy” means becoming the “great liberator” by providing amnesty for illegal immigrants.
“If he wins, then overnight he goes from the president with the most deportations to the great liberator,” said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies of New York. “If he loses, I’m afraid historians won’t give him much credit for making the effort.”
It wouldn’t be an NYT story without a heart-tugging reference to immigrants “coming out of the shadows.” (Though they’re not exactly hiding, if the countless pro-amnesty protests over the last decade are any indication.)
While Shear and Davis managed to avoid the “undocumented” euphemism and used the phrase “immigrants here illegally,” there was a border around the blunter, more efficient term “illegal immigrants.”
A victory in the Supreme Court for Mr. Obama would allow millions of immigrants here illegally to come out of the shadows and stay in the country, but it would also be certain to provide new political ammunition for Donald J. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the Republican presidential candidates who have used anti-immigrant rhetoric to rally support during the primaries.
Administration officials say a late-spring surge of Central American migrants crossing the southern border -- something that has happened before -- could create a sense that the border is out of control at precisely the time that the Republican candidates are seeking to capitalize on the issue to bolster their campaigns.
Mr. Obama announced his executive actions in late 2014 in a program called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, which was aimed at as many as five million people in the country illegally. But the program was blocked by courts after Texas and 26 other states challenged it as an overreach of presidential authority.
There were no ideological labels for pro-amnesty groups, but anti-amnesty received “conservative” and “anti-immigration” tags.
“There’s a lot there for the Latino community to digest as it looks back on eight years of the Obama administration,” said Angela Maria Kelley, a veteran of Washington’s immigration battles and the executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, an advocacy group. “There will be a lot less indigestion if the Supreme Court upholds the executive actions.”
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“The tenor of the debate around the issue of immigration -- around Latinos and Muslims -- has been so vitriolic and hostile that there’s a lot of attention,” Ms. Kelley said. “Fear can be quite the motivator.”
Conservative activists have also mobilized in advance of Monday’s hearing. NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration organization, is urging the 3.7 million people who have “liked” it on Facebook and a million email subscribers to call their lawmakers and journalists in their hometowns to rally opposition to the president’s actions.
But Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group, said Mr. Trump and the other Republicans might not get an electoral boost from the court ruling. He said conservative immigration activists were already certain to vote for the Republican candidate.
