Migrants seeking asylum from Central America sit next to a vehicle stopped by police after crossing the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas from Mexico along Highway 90, in Hondo, Texas, U.S., May 1 6 year 2022.
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
A Supreme Court decision will uphold a controversial Trump-era rule that allows the United States to deport migrants at the Mexican border as a public health measure in response to the pandemic.
The court voted 5-4 on Tuesday to accept an urgent request from 19 Republican state attorneys general who have sought to intervene to defend the policy. It also agreed to hear oral arguments in February and decide whether states can intervene, with a decision due by the end of June. This policy will remain in place at least until such judgment is issued.
“Title 42 is a public health measure, not an immigration enforcement measure, and it should not be extended indefinitely,” the White House said in a statement. “To really fix our broken immigration system, we need Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform measures like the ones President Biden proposed on his first day in office. .”
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joined three libertarians in court to vote against the stay request. The court order succinctly states that while the administration cannot waive Title 42 policy, the decision “does not prevent the federal government from taking any action related to that policy.”
More than 2 million people have been deported at the southern border under the policy since 2020.
In November, a federal district court in Washington, DC, ordered the Department of Homeland Security to end the policy on December 21, criticizing the evictions as arbitrary. But the Republican-led states intervened in the case and succeeded in petitioning the high court to block the lower court ruling. Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked the Biden administration earlier this month from ending the controversial policy.
The deportation policy originated with the Trump administration. In March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used a provision in the Public Health Services Act, or Title 42, to bar migrants from Mexico or Canada from entering the United States due to the risk of the disease. chances of them spreading Covid-19. The eviction policy is often referred to simply as Title 42.
But human rights groups and dozens of health experts have fiercely criticized the policy as a way for the federal government to carry out arbitrary mass deportations at the southern border under the guise of public health. .
The White House continued this policy until April 2022, when the CDC said it would take longer to contain the spread of Covid. The CDC and DHS had planned for the policy to end in May, but the Republican states sued and were ordered by federal court in Louisiana to prevent the Biden administration from ending the deportations at that time.
Republicans and some Democrats argue that ending the policy will lead to a massive increase in migration at the southern border that communities there can’t afford to cope with. El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency on Saturday in response to the recent surge in migrants crossing the border.
