President Barack Obama's November 2014 immigration executive actions, which expanded his deferred action programs, are still questioned by courts, and his administration narrowly missed contempt charges for helping undocumented immigrants.

Judge Andrew Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas' Brownsville Division decided not to file contempt charges on members of Obama's administration due to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) providing work permits to more than 2,000 immigrants despite his February temporary injunction halting the president's 2014 executive actions.

Last November, Obama announced the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was originally created by his 2012 executive action that provided undocumented immigrant youths two-year permits to stay in the U.S. and temporarily avoid deportation. Based on the 2012 guidelines, the DACA permits are renewable every two years. With the 2012 executive action, the two-year permit increases to three-year permits.

The president's 2014 executive action also saw the introduction of the Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA) program, aimed for undocumented immigrant parents. DAPA would allow undocumented immigrants parents to request deferred action from deportation and obtain employment authorization if the parent lived in the U.S. since Jan. 1, 2010, and has a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident child born on or before Nov. 20, 2014, the same day as Obama's immigration executive action address.

Obama's executive actions would help approximately 4.9 million undocumented immigrants, but Hanen issued a temporary injunction on the Obama administration on Feb. 16, one day ahead of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within DHS, was to start the updated DACA and DAPA guidelines.

Despite the injunction, DHS revealed USCIS mistakenly issued more than 2,000 three-year permits to DACA recipients. USCIS has since worked to retrieve the inaccurate permits, but Hanen was not pleased.

Hanen held a hearing on April 19, which provided attorneys for the Obama administration to explain the inaccurate DACA permits.

"We don't believe a sanction is appropriate, but the states need to prove how they will suffer harm, and we have provided the information as requested to allow the states to make that conclusion," government attorney Jennifer Ricketts said, via Courthouse News Service. "We apologize for the miscommunication that was unintended. We were not trying to hide anything from the court."

"We apologize for those miscommunications and regret them,'" James Gilligan, a Justice Department attorney, told Hanen. "They were inadvertent and unintended."

Hanen wants another update from the Obama administration in September. He questioned both plaintiffs and defendants to suggest what punishment to potentially impose the Obama administration if he decides he was intentionally misled, according to Bloomberg News.

As Latin Post reported, then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who has since become the state's governor, filed a lawsuit to block Obama's immigration executive actions. Since Abbott became Texas governor, new Attorney General Ken Paxton continued the lawsuit. Twenty-five states have since joined the Texas lawsuit, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) reported estimated the U.S. GDP will increase by 0.4 percent over the next 10 years, which will equate to $90 billion in "real GDP" by 2024 -- based on the current worth of the U.S. dollar -- if the executive actions are implemented. The CEA also projected a "plausible upper-bound projection, based on the more optimistic estimates in the economic literature" that the country's GDP could increase by 0.9 percent, or the equivalent of $210 billion by 2024.

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For the latest updates, follow Latin Post's Politics Editor Michael Oleaga on Twitter: @EditorMikeO or contact via email: m.oleaga@latinpost.com.

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