ImmigrationSheriff Joe Arpaio loses yet another round in court battle over Obama’s executive order

Arizona Sheriff Joseph Arpaio on Friday lost yet another round in his on-going battle against the Obama administration over immigration.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in Arpaio v. Obama, ruled unanimously that Arpaio did not have standing to sue.

The Phoenix New Times reports that Arpaio had complained that the administration’s deferred-deportation executive order, which would allow about five million immigrants who meet certain criteria to stay in the country, would attract others to cross the U.S.-Mexico border into his jurisdiction in Maricopa County. He argued that those crossing the border into Arizona would stay in the county – which includes the city of Phoenix — to commit crimes.

In her opinion for a three-judge panel, Judge Nina Pillard, an Obama appointee who was approved by the Senate only after a change of rules, said Arpaio’s contentions are “unduly speculative”:

We conclude that Sheriff Arpaio has failed to allege an injury that is both fairly traceable to the deferred action policies and redressable by enjoining them, as our standing precedents require. His allegations that the policies will cause more crime in Maricopa County are unduly speculative. Projected increases he anticipates in the county’s policing burden and jail population rest on chains of supposition and contradict acknowledged realities.

Judge Pillard dismissed the two premises of Arapio’s claims to standing – the magnet premise and the more-crime-in-Maricopa premise.

On the magnet theory she wrote:

Sheriff Arpaio recognizes that the deferred action policies he challenges apply only to people who are already present in the United States and who either arrived as children or are parents of children who are United States citizens or lawful permanent residents. His magnet theory nonetheless assumes that the policies will cause non-citizens outside of the United States to cross the border in the mistaken hope of benefitting from the current policies. Alternatively, Sheriff Arpaio posits that foreign citizens will view the current policies as a sign of things to come, and will therefore cross the border in the hope of benefitting from hypothesized future, similar policies that are not the subject of Sheriff Arpaio’s challenge. Our precedents establish that standing based on third-party conduct—such as the anticipated reactions of undocumented aliens abroad — is significantly harder to show than standing based on harm imposed by one’s litigation adversary. That difficulty is compounded here because the third-party conduct the complaint forecasts depends on large numbers of people having the same unlikely experiences and behaviors: For the harms Sheriff Arpaio alleges to occur and be redressable by the injunction he seeks, aliens abroad would have to learn about the deferred action policies, mistakenly think that they were eligible to benefit from them, or harbor a hope of becoming eligible for future, similar policies as yet unannounced, actually leave their homes and enter the United States illegally based on that false assumption, commit crime in Maricopa County, become involved in — and costly to — the criminal justice system there, and be less likely under deferred action to be removed from the United States than they would have been without those policies in place.