Gov. Paul LePage has signed Maine on as a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the Obama administration over its recently announced executive action on immigration.
Texas is leading the 17-state coalition challenging Obama’s executive action, which would allow 4.4 million undocumented immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents remain in the U.S. temporarily without threat of deportation.
The thing is, Texas is the only one of the 17 states challenging the executive action with a population that’s more than 10 percent foreign-born, writes Ted Hesson on Fusion.net. Some 13 percent of the total U.S. population is foreign-born, according to the Pew Research Center.
A number of the states that have signed onto the lawsuit are, like Maine, rural and white. The 17 states are: Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Only Montana and West Virginia have Democratic governors, though they have Republican attorneys general.
Hesson also writes that the Obama administration has prepared for such a lawsuit and that a similar legal challenge failed in 2013 following Obama’s executive action allowing young, undocumented immigrants who entered the country illegally as children to stay in the country.