The Supreme Court will allow the Biden administration to reinstate rules that instruct Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to focus immigration enforcement in the interior of the U.S. on illegal aliens with criminal records or who pose a threat to national security.
The court found that Texas and Louisiana, the two states that challenged the guidelines, didn’t have standing to bring the suit.
The ruling was 8-1 with only Justice Alito dissenting.
The decision confirmed the growing power of the executive to dictate immigration policy in the absence of congressional guidance. And it confirmed the narrow enforcement of immigration law the Biden administration is using.
At the center of the dispute is a memo issued in 2021 by the Biden administration that directed ICE agents to prioritize the arrest of immigrants with serious criminal records, national security threats and migrants who recently entered the U.S. illegally. The policy generally shielded unauthorized immigrants who have been living in the U.S. for years from being arrested by ICE if they did not commit serious crimes.
The Biden administration has argued the memo, signed by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, allows ICE to concentrate its limited resources — and 6,000 deportation agents — on apprehending and deporting immigrants who pose the greatest threats to public safety, national security and border security. The policy, administration officials have argued, relies on the recognition that the government can’t deport the millions of people living in the country unlawfully
Republican officials in Texas and Louisiana challenged the memo in federal court, saying the memo “restrained ICE agents from fully enforcing immigration law.” The states were successful in blocking the policy in the lower courts but the high court decided to hear the case last year.
“They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests,” Kavanaugh wrote in his majority opinion. “Federal courts have traditionally not entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”
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Kavanaugh suggested that the courts were not the proper avenue to decide immigration issues and that Congress was the proper place to resolve them.
In his blistering dissent, Justice Alito concurred with that sentiment and wondered why the Biden administration didn’t want to follow the law.
“To put the point simply, Congress enacted a law that requires the apprehension and detention of certain illegal aliens whose release, it thought, would endanger public safety,” Alito wrote. “The Secretary of DHS does not agree with that categorical requirement. He prefers a more flexible policy.”
What this means is that there will be even less enforcement of immigration law in the interior of the United States, making our sovereignty even more of a joke.
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