The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to keep Title 42 in place indefinitely.
This enables officials to turn away migrants at the border in order to stop the COVID-19 virus from spreading.
When the decision was made, there were about 50,000 foreigners waiting to enter the country.
The sole conservative justice to join all of the liberal justices on the Supreme Court was Justice Neil Gorsuch, who dissented by stating, “The current border crisis is not a COVID crisis.”
“And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency,” he wrote, according to KTLA.
“We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”
This law, which provides the president the power to halt immigration, was utilized by Donald Trump as an emergency measure. The practice is acceptable to prevent the spread of contagious diseases.
Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., issued an order directing the Biden administration to lift Title 42 as a result of a case brought by families seeking asylum.
According to Sullivan, applying that provision was an “arbitrary” application of the law.
“It is unreasonable for the CDC to assume that it can ignore the consequences of any actions it chooses to take in the pursuit of fulfilling its goals, particularly when those actions included the extraordinary decision to suspend the codified procedural and substantive rights of non-citizens seeking safe harbor,” he wrote.
According to the Associated Press, immigration supporters filed a lawsuit to repeal Title 42. Claiming COVID is now better and that they should be allowed to enter.
It also said Title 42 “goes against American and international obligations to people fleeing to the U.S. to escape persecution.”
Federal officials stated that Ending Title 42 may lead to ending the restrictions would likely lead to “disruption and a temporary increase in unlawful border crossings.”
“However, they still asked the nation’s highest court to reject the request from 19 Republican state attorneys general to maintain the policy.”
Daily Wire has more information on this story:
Leaders in border cities had been bracing for an influx of immigrants. Oscar Leeser, the Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency on Saturday in anticipation of the end of Title 42. “Our asylum seekers are not safe,” the official said at a press conference. “We have hundreds and hundreds on the street, and that’s not the way we treat our people.”
More than 80,000 migrants have entered El Paso in the last four months; approximately 678,000 people currently reside in the city, where temperatures can drop below freezing during winter nights. Leeser did not rule out the option of using a nearby military base to temporarily house migrants, adding that officials were discussing options with state and federal authorities.
The Department of Homeland Security previously vowed to continue enforcing Title 42 until the policy ended. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week that the agency would “process individuals encountered at the border without proper travel documents using its longstanding Title 8 authorities, which provide for meaningful consequences, including barring individuals who are removed from re-entry for five years.”
