OBAMAgration: Obama receives a Cold Reception for his Immigration Plan at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals

Government lawyers labored on Friday to persuade federal appeals court judges here to allow President Obama to move ahead with sweeping initiatives to protect immigrants in the country illegally. But the judges’ questions seemed to make it ever more unlikely that the president’s programs, which he has hoped would be a central piece of his legacy, would start any time before the last months of his term, if at all.

A panel of three judges of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit heard arguments in a lawsuit by Texas and 25 other states challenging executive actions Mr. Obama announced in November that would give temporary reprieves from deportation to as many as four million immigrants and also permit them to work.

In February, a federal district judge in Texas blocked the programs. On May 26, a panel of the Fifth Circuit denied the administration’s emergency request to cancel that injunction, with two judges supporting the denial and one dissenting. This time, the judges heard a broader appeal by the government on the challenge to the executive actions.

Judge Jerry E. Smith and Judge Jennifer Elrod

But even though the judges issued no decision on Friday, it seemed highly probable that the administration would lose. By a stroke of bad luck for Mr. Obama and good fortune for the states bringing the lawsuit, two judges on Friday’s panel — Judge Jerry E. Smith and Judge Jennifer Elrod — are the same conservatives who ruled against the administration in May. Court officials said both panels had been randomly selected, well before the administration even brought its case to the Fifth Circuit.

A setback now would be decisively damaging to the president’s argument that he has full authority to carry out the vast programs nationwide and would leave the administration little choice but to take the case to the high-stakes and slow-moving deliberations of the Supreme Court and to hope for a favorable ruling before the end of its term in June of next year.

14 arrested during immigration rally near New Orleans 
federal appeals court

Mr. Obama has run into far deeper legal trouble than officials anticipated when they decided last year to create a program by executive action, without approval by Congress, extending deportation deferrals and work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants who are parents of American citizens or legal residents.

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