Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Biden administration to end the use of Title 42 to expel potential migrants due to public health concerns.
Title 42 is a policy that grants federal health authorities the ability to prohibit migrants from entering the nation if it is determined that doing so could prevent the spread of contagious diseases.
The CDC invoked the law in March 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This gave border patrol officers the authority to expel potential migrants attempting to enter the nation instead of allowing them to seek asylum.
Although the policy applies to the Canadian and Mexican borders, the Biden administration has relied on this policy to manage the southern border due to the heightened number of unlawful migrant apprehensions.
Title 42 was expanded by the Department of Homeland Security in October to include migrants from Venezuela, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
But the D.C. court’s opinion on November 15 declared Title 42 to be “arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.”
The order results from a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU argued for the dissolution of Title 42 on the grounds that the policy restricted immigration based on “an unprecedented and unlawful invocation of the Public Health Service Act.”
The organization had previously partnered with Oxfam America, the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, RAICES, and Texas Civil Rights Project to sue the Trump administration in 2020 for immigration expulsions.
The group returned to court in 2021 to argue for the termination of the Trump-era policy following unsuccessful negotiations with the Biden administration.
“This is a huge victory and one that literally has life-and-death stakes,” said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer who filed the lawsuit.
“We have said all along that using Title 42 against asylum seekers was inhumane and driven purely by politics,” he added. “Hopefully, this ruling will end this horrific policy once and for all.”
Biden administration lawyers filed an emergency motion on November 15, asking Sullivan to postpone his ruling for five weeks. They cited concerns about abruptly ending the policy and the need for an orderly transition to Title 8 immigrant processing.
“During this period of time, DHS will need to move additional resources to the border and coordinate with stakeholders, including non-governmental organizations and state and local governments,” explained the lawyers in the motion.
“This transition period is critical to ensuring that DHS can continue to carry out its mission to secure the nation’s borders and to conduct its border operations in an orderly fashion,” they asserted.
Sullivan granted the request on November 16, stating the ruling would go into effect on December 21 at midnight.
However, 15 Republican-led states, including Texas, formed a coalition to oppose the ending of Title 42. This coalition said Biden administration officials had “abandoned their defense” of Title 42 in only asking for a five-week suspension of this initial ruling and not an appeal.
“Because invalidation of the Title 42 Orders will directly harm the States, they now seek to intervene to offer a defense of the Title 42 policy so that its validity can be resolved on the merits, rather than through strategic surrender,” the states wrote.
The ACLU have been busy beavers lately. Something needs to be done about those leftist quacks.