WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the Biden administration’s efforts to end a Trump-era immigration program that forced asylum seekers arriving at the southwestern border to wait for approval in Mexico.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by Judge Brett M. Cavanaugh and the three Liberal members of the tribunal. Judge Amy Connie Barrett agreed with much of the chief judge’s analysis.
The disputed program, known as Stay in Mexico and officially as the Protocols for the Protection of Migrants, concerns people who have left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the US border. After the introduction of the policy in early 2019, tens of thousands of people waited in unhygienic tent camps for immigration hearings. There are widespread reports of sexual violence, abductions and torture.
Shortly after taking office, President Biden tried to end the program. Texas and Missouri have filed a lawsuit, and lower courts have reinstated it, ruling that federal immigration laws require the return of immigrants who arrive by land and who cannot be detained while their cases are being heard.
Since the Biden administration restarted the program in December, far fewer migrants have been enrolled than in the Trump era. This is partly due to the fact that the United States has agreed to take further steps to respond to certain requests from Mexico, including sending migrants back to the program only if there is enough space for shelter.
By the end of May, the Biden administration had included more than 7,200 migrants in the program since December 2021. Most of those enrolled in recent months were from Nicaragua and were men.
From January 2019, when the Trump administration launched the program, to the end of 2020, nearly 70,000 migrants were sent back to Mexico to await court hearings, according to the U.S. Immigration Council.
The case, Biden v. Texas, 21-954, was unusually complex, involving three legal provisions pointing in different directions.
One provision states that the federal government usually “detains” immigrants while they wait for their immigration procedures to be considered. But Congress has never allocated enough money to keep the number of people affected.
In 2021, for example, the government processed about 670,000 migrants arriving at the border with Mexico, but had the capacity to hold about 34,000.
The second provision says that the government can “return” migrants who arrive by land in the country from which they came.
The third provision allows the government to release migrants in the United States while they await their hearings “on a case-by-case basis for humanitarian humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
Judge Matthew J. Kachmarik of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, in Amarillo, ruled last year that immigration laws require the return of non-citizens seeking asylum in Mexico when the federal government does not have the resources to detain them.
The Biden administration immediately asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but it refused to block Judge Kachmarik’s decision to restart the program. Three other liberal judges disagreed.
The brief, unsigned court order at the time said the administration appeared to have acted arbitrarily and capriciously in canceling the program, citing a 2020 decision that refused to allow the Trump administration to immediately repeal an era-era program. Obama defending famous young immigrants as dreamers.
The Biden administration then took steps to restart the program, although it issued a new decision to terminate it. Administration officials, in response to criticism that they acted hastily, released a 38-page memorandum outlining their reasons.
They concluded that the costs of the program outweighed the benefits. These costs, the note said, include dangerous conditions in Mexico, the difficulties immigrants face in consulting lawyers across borders, and the ways in which the program undermines the administration’s foreign policy goals and domestic policy initiatives.
A three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth District of New Orleans rejected the administration’s plan to close the program.
“The government says it has an uncontrollable and one-sided discretion to create and remove entire components of the federal bureaucracy that affect countless people, tax dollars and sovereign states,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote of the commission. “The government also says it has an unreasonable and unilateral discretion to ignore legal restrictions imposed by Congress.
“And the government says it can do all this by writing a new ‘note’ and posting it on the Internet,” he added. “If the government was right, it would replace the rule of law with the rule of law. We think the government is wrong. “
Eileen Sullivan contributed to the report.
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