Rep. Juan Vargas said Tuesday he is confident that President Obama’s immigration orders will be upheld and urged San Diego County’s 91,000 undocumented immigrants to come “out of the shadows.”
Vargas said he is “100% confident” that an injunction issued by a federal judge in Brownsville, TX, will be overturned on appeal.
“We’re on the right side of history,” Vargas told immigrant rights activists outside a church in the Grant Hill neighborhood of San Diego. “They had a hard time finding a judge who would do this.”
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling late Monday temporarily blocks executive actions Obama took last year to shield as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation. The Obama administration said it will appeal the injunction to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.
Jeh Johson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said his department will comply with the injunction while the appeals process plays out and will not begin expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program on Wednesday, as previously scheduled. A second new program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans, is set to go into effect in May.
Local immigration activists, including Alliance San Diego, urged undocumented immigrants in San Diego to complete their applications and come forward as soon as the appeals process is finished.
“The intention of this judge…is to intimidate people and discourage people,” said Richard Barrera, a board member of the San Diego Unified School District,
Vargas, whose district stretches along the Mexican border from Imperial Beach to Arizona, noted that the ruling came out of Brownsville, not Houston, Dallas or San Antonio, where most of Texas’ undocumented immigrants live. “They went looking for a judge. It’s called forum shopping,” he said
