AG Lynch: Mass Blanket Pardons for Undocumented Immigrants Not Forthcoming

On Thursday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch handed a bit of a reality check to some advocates for immigration reform when she told the assembled at a Politico Playbook breakfast event in Washington, D.C. that there would be no group pardon of undocumented immigrants before the president leaves office next month.

According to CNN, her statement came as a response to a question she was asked at the event about whether ���DREAMers��� ��� young people who came to the country as children but who remain undocumented - might be pardoned as a group by President Obama.

���The issue of pardoning someone is an individual decision that's made on a case-by-case basis, and so there's no legal framework or regulatory framework that allows for a pardon of a group en masse,��� said Lynch.

Another obstacle facing DREAMers, were they to actually receive such an unprecedented pardon, is that the act, in and of itself, would not magically grant them legal status as U.S. citizens - that is a separate matter. This is a point recently clarified by Cecilia Munoz, assistant to the president and director of the White House���s domestic policy council:

���I know people are hoping that pardon authority is a way to protect people. It's ultimately not, for a couple of reasons. One is that pardon authority is generally designed for criminal violations not civil, but also it doesn't confer legal status; only Congress can do that. So ultimately it wouldn't protect a single soul from deportation. So it's not an answer here for this population. I know people are hoping for an answer but by its very nature, the use of executive authority in this way is subject to the will of the executive.���

By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large