The only thing saving Joe Biden’s political hide on the border since he took office has been an obscure public health law that allows the government to immediately expel illegal aliens who arrive at the border. Title 42 was first imposed by Donald Trump in 2020 despite the predictable and vicious outcry from open borders fanatics.
Without Title 42, more than a million illegal aliens who showed up at our border since Biden’s term began would have been allowed in.
Despite enormous pressure applied by fanatics to drop the rule and embrace the chaos, Biden valued his job more than the support of the crazies. He maintained the Title 42 restrictions for the most part, allowing some exceptions but also allowing for the deportation of almost all illegals who show up at the border.
Now, two appeals court rulings have mostly upheld Title 42 but with some important exceptions. The Biden administration will likely be forced to examine an illegal’s asylum claim to make sure they aren’t returned to a country where they will be tortured or killed, according to a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — the most liberal appeals court in the country.
“It is likely that [Title 42] grants the Executive sweeping authority to prohibit aliens from entering the United States during a public-health emergency; that the Executive may expel aliens who violate such a prohibition; and that under…the Convention Against Torture, the Executive cannot expel aliens to countries where their ‘life or freedom would be threatened,’” the three-judge panel wrote in a unanimous opinion.
In Texas, a ruling in a suit brought by the state against the federal government said the Biden administration can’t exempt unaccompanied children from Title 42 based strictly on their status as unaccompanied children.
The ruling still doesn’t require the Biden administration to refrain from expelling illegal alien families. But the appeals court ruling in D.C. means that the process of expulsion will grind to a halt as each individual family will have to go through screening to make sure they wouldn’t be in danger of being tortured or killed if they return.
The judges acknowledged that their ruling would mean that more migrants would be kept in detention in close proximity to each other and to border officials, one of the situations the government’s Title 42 policy had sought to avoid to prevent the spread of Covid-19. But the court rebuked the Biden administration for failing to adjust its pandemic reasoning as time passed.
“The CDC’s [Title 42] order looks in certain respects like a relic from an era with no vaccines, scarce testing, few therapeutics, and little certainty,” the judges wrote. “We cannot blindly defer to the CDC in these circumstances.”
The Border Patrol arrested more than 153,000 illegal border crossers in January — a 14% decrease from December but the highest total of arrests in January since 2000. Once Title 42 rules are rescinded by the Biden administration, the floodgates will open — with the eager assistance of the open borders fanatics.
When that happens, it will be the fault of the man who promised to reverse Trump-era policies and allow for “fair, orderly, and humane” immigration.
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