Asylum searching for migrants from Central America sit next to a vehicle that was stopped by police after crossing the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas from Mexico along U.S. Route 90, in Hondo, Texas, U.S., June 1, 2022.Â
Shannon Stapleton | Reuters
A Supreme Court decision will keep in place for now a controversial Trump-era rule that permits the U.S. to deport migrants on the Mexican border as a public health measure in response to the pandemic.
The court voted 5-4 on Tuesday to grant an emergency request by 19 Republican state attorneys general who sought to intervene in defense of the policy. It also agreed to listen to oral arguments in February and rule on whether the states can intervene, with a choice due by the tip of June. The policy will remain in place at the very least until that ruling is issued.
“Title 42 is a public health measure, not an immigration enforcement measure, and it shouldn’t be prolonged indefinitely,” the White House said in an announcement. “To actually fix our broken immigration system, we’d like Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform measures just like the ones President Biden proposed on his first day in office.”
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the three liberals on the court in voting against the stay request. The temporary court order said that while the administration cannot put aside the Title 42 policy, the choice “doesn’t prevent the federal government from taking any motion with respect to that policy.”
Greater than 2 million people have been deported on the southern border under the policy since 2020.
In November, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., had ordered the Department of Homeland Security to finish the policy Dec. 21, criticizing the deportations as arbitrary. But Republican-led states intervened within the case and successfully petitioned the high court to dam that 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 under the Public Health Services Act, or Title 42, to ban migrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico or Canada resulting from the danger of them spreading Covid-19. The deportation policy is usually referred to easily as Title 42.
But human rights groups and dozens of health experts fiercely criticized the policy as a way for the federal government to perform arbitrary mass deportations on the southern border under the guise of public health.
The White House continued the policy until April 2022, when the CDC said it was longer mandatory to stop the spread of Covid. The CDC and DHS had planned for the policy to finish in May, but Republican states sued and got a federal court in Louisiana to dam the Biden administration from ending the deportations at the moment as well.
Republicans and a few Democrats argue that ending the policy will result in a serious increase in migration on the southern border that communities there are unequipped to cope with. El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency on Saturday in response to a recent increase in migrants crossing the border.
