WASHINGTON (AP) December,28– The Supreme Court has upheld pandemic-era asylum restrictions for now, dashing the hopes of migrants fleeing violence and inequality in Latin America and elsewhere to reach the United States.
Tuesday’s ruling upholds a key Trump-era policy that a judge ordered to expire on Dec. 21. The case was heard in February, and the injunction issued last week by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts remains in effect pending a judge’s decision.
The restrictions, often dubbed Title 42 after the Public Health Act of 1944, were introduced early in the pandemic under then-President Donald Trump, but the resolution has had an uphill road in court. . The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sought to end the policy in April 2022, but a federal judge in Louisiana backed 19 Republican-run states in May, ordering the policy to remain in place. Another federal judge in Washington said in November that Title 42 had ended and the dispute had to be sent to the Supreme Court. Authorities have deported her 2.5 million asylum seekers across the United States in an effort to stem the spread of COVID-19.
Andrea Rudnik, co-founder of Team Brownsville, a nonprofit immigrant relief organization in South Texas, said the situation at the border was a humanitarian crisis. She said thousands of migrants were camped in boxes and makeshift tents near the entrance to the Gateway International Bridge in Matamoros, Mexico, across from Brownsville, without food, water, clothing or toilets. said. “Without toilets, it quickly becomes a dangerous situation,” Rudnik said. “If you get a bunch of people without bathrooms together, you’ll know what you have.”
States wishing to keep Title 42 welcomed the result. In a press release on Tuesday, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds praised the court’s decision but said it was not a permanent solution to the country’s immigration problem.
“We are grateful that Title 42 remains in effect to prevent illegal entry at the U.S. Southern border. But make no mistake, this is just a temporary solution to a crisis that President Biden and his administration ignored for two years.
The Supreme Court’s ruling says the court will consider whether the state has the right to intervene in a Title 42 lawsuit. Both the federal government and immigration advocates argue that states waited too long to intervene, and that even if they hadn’t waited that long, they were unreliable to intervene. .
In a dissenting opinion, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson argued that the court held that states had the right to intervene and that even if Title 42 was legally adopted, “…these The emergency on which the order was based has long since passed.”
“The current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” the judge said.
“Nor should courts be concerned with upholding emergency-only executive orders because elected officials failed to address another emergency. We are a court, not policy makers of last resort,” the judge wrote.
In November, a federal judge sided with the attorneys and set a December 21st deadline to end the policy. Conservative states have appealed to the Supreme Court, warning that increased immigration will strain public services and cause an “unprecedented disaster” that the federal government said could not be dealt with.
