The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has created turmoil in Washington DC and on the Presidential campaign trail. Republicans are uniformly calling on the President to refrain from nominating anyone to fill the vacancy due to the upcoming Presidential election. Within hours of the news of the Justice’s death, Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader and the man who controls the Senate’s agenda, stated that the “vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” 
What just happened in the 5th Circuit?
The U.S. Court of Appeals formally upheld Judge Hanen’s injunction prohibiting the administration for implementing DAPA & DACA. The injunction prohibited the administration from implementing DAPA and expanded DACA until the litigation brought by Texas and twenty six other states was resolved. Injunctions are sought to preserve the status quo while the legality or proposed actions is resolved. Judge Hanen ruled that Texas presented evidence of the possible injury if DAPA or DACA went forward and that Texas was likely to succeed in challenging DAPA and expanded DACA. 
Yesterday, in a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an immigrant who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor paraphernalia charge for concealing pills in his sock cannot be deported for the offense. Simply stated, Moones Mellouli faced the possibility of deportation for possession of a sock.
Mellouli, who came to the U.S. on a student visa from Tunisia in 2004, graduated with honors from U.S. 
Looking back on what turned out to be a disappointing 2013 for the lack of progress on meaningful immigration reform and on the continuing pace of removals, we have tried to figure out what articles and stories most appealed to our readers. Turns out that our readers were not as interested in the minute-by-minute accounts of progress, but rather came to Lifted Lamp for information about developments in the law that had a real impact upon their lives. 
Tomorrow, December 10, 2013, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Mayorkas v. Cuellar de Osorio, reviewing the 9th circuit decision that reversed the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision in Matter of Wang that rejected the applicability of the Child Status Protection Act (CSPA) to a large number of immigrants. If the Supreme Court upholds the decision of the 9th Circuit, many aged-out young adults will be immediately eligible to apply for residence. 
The Supreme Court rocked the world last week by declaring Section III of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional on equal protection grounds. Section III forbade the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Thus, a legal same-sex marriage entered into in New York was valid under NY law, but did not provide the married couple with any federal benefits. Activists have identified over 1100 ways that federal law provides a benefit to a married couple, all of which were unavailable until Wednesday, June 26, when Section III of DOMA was officially bid adieu. 
One of the biggest immigration cases of the current Supreme Court terms is not about immigration at all. Today, March 27, 2013, the Court heard arguments in U.S. v. Windsor, a case that is about the validity of a same-sex marriage and its recognition under U.S. law. In 2007, Edie Windsor married her longtime partner, Theya Speyer in Canada, which allows same-sex marriage. When Speyer died in 2009, Windsor was hit with a $363,000 tax bill that she would not have been required to pay if Speyer had been a man. 
