The Supreme Court ruled that Title 42 can remain indefinitely. Officials can continue to return immigrants away to keep the spread of COVID down. Border patrol said there’s a lot of migrants waiting to cross to the tune of 50,000 people. Chief Justice John Roberts stayed a lower court’s ruling. Trump used the statute to keep COVID cases down. But families that wanted asylum filed a lawsuit to lift it.
Title 42 can stay in place
Justice Neil Gorsuch was the only dissenting conservative. He thought that “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. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”
Judge Ernest Sullivan had ruled for those families seeking asylum so he had ordered the Biden administration to lift the statute Wednesday. In November he said, “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.”
Title 42 is outdated
Immigrants activists sued on that basis since COVID treatment has advanced. The statute “goes against American and international obligations to people fleeing to the U.S. to escape persecution.”
Leaders in border areas were bracing for a surge in immigrants. The Democratic mayor of El Paso, Texas, Oscar Leeser had declared a state of emergency. He thought Title 42 was going to end. Leeser said, “Our asylum seekers are not safe. We have hundreds and hundreds on the street and that’s not the way we treat our people.”
A lot of immigrants
Over 80,000 immigrants have already entered El Paso. About 678,000 people currently reside there. Temperatures can drop below freezing in the winter so Leeser and other officials are considering using a military base in the area to house people.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the department would uphold Title 42 as long as it exists. He said they 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.”
