A Tuesday vote in the U.S. Supreme Court ended in a 5-4 ruling to keep in place Title 42, the pandemic-era limit on immigration that allows officials to turn away migrants along the border to prevent the spread of COVID.
Officials with Customs and Border Protection issued a warning to legislators that almost 50,000 foreigners were poised to dash across the border into the United States after Title 42 ended. As reported by The Associated Press, an order from Chief Justice John Roberts blocked the ruling from the lower court, which justices extended to allow the court the proper time to consider all sides of the argument.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, the sole dissenting conservative justice that voted alongside the Supreme Court’s liberal justices in Tuesday’s ruling, claimed 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,” he stated, as explained by KTLA. “We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”
The reinforced statute, which hands over the power to commanders-in-chief to close down immigration in an emergency for the purpose of keeping communicable diseases out of the United States, was last utilized by former President Donald trump due to the spreading outbreak of the COVID virus. Families attempting to get asylum had filed a lawsuit, which led Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to call on Old Uncle Joe to take down the Title 42 order by Wednesday.
Sullivan stated back during his ruling from November that the use of Title 42 to stop migrants from getting into the United States for Asylum is just an “arbitrary” use of the order.
“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 explained.
As explained by The Associated Press, groups of immigration activists slammed a lawsuit for the purpose of closing down Title 42, making the argument that the policy is entirely outdated — all because the COVID treatments have gotten better — and that it “goes against American and international obligations to people fleeing to the U.S. to escape persecution.”
Federal officials stated that taking down the restrictions would most likely end up causing “disruption and a temporary increase in unlawful border crossings.”
