Comment The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected the Biden administration’s request to reinstate a policy limiting immigration arrests after a Texas district judge said the guidance to immigration officers violated federal law. Instead, the court said it would consider the merits of the case in December. Four justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson — said they would have granted the administration’s request to put a lower court ruling on hold. It was Jackson’s first vote since joining the court. In September, the Department of Homeland Security directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to prioritize the detention of recent travelers and immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety and to consider giving a break to immigrants with mitigating factors. , such as farmers harvesting crops and grandmothers caring for American children. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said being in the country without authorization “should not be the only basis” for arrest or removal, a shift from the Trump administration’s view. Republican attorneys general across the country filed lawsuits, and those in Texas and Louisiana were successful. Judge Drew Tipton in Texas agreed, arguing that the policy burdened them with the costs of immigrants’ education, health care and other services and ignored federal laws that require ICE to detain and deport immigrants who commit serious crimes or have received a recent deportation order. Tipton, appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump, sided with the states and gutted ICE’s priorities, leaving the agency without operational guidelines. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the administration’s appeal to put Tipton’s order on hold while it considered the merits of the case. Across southern Arizona, a full spectrum of border woes for Biden That was the opposite of what a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found when it reviewed a nearly identical case filed by Arizona, Montana and Ohio. Chief Justice Jeffrey Sutton, a Republican appointee, wrote that the DHS policy “does not tie the hands of immigration officials” and that congressional orders have some flexibility. Federal laws require ICE to detain immigrants with serious criminal records and anyone with a final deportation order with the goal of deporting them within 90 days. But such enforcement never materialized, Sutton wrote. “Which presidential administration since this law took effect in 1996, it is fair to ask, has gone so far as to remove nearly all eligible non-citizens within 90 days, whether for reasons permitted by law or not?” He wrote. Sutton wrote that Republican and Democratic administrations have long set their own enforcement priorities. Under Trump, anyone in the United States illegally could be a target for enforcement, while the Obama administration has sought to limit removals to “offenses, not families.” The 5th Circuit panel said it was “inclined to agree” with Tipton and rejected the Biden administration’s request to stay the Tipton ruling that eliminates ICE’s enforcement priorities. The Texas case is among a series of lawsuits that have sought to overturn Biden’s immigration policies, which he has characterized as a more humane approach to law enforcement. The president tried to “pause” deportations for 100 days, a policy that Tipton also blocked, and filed a bill that would have allowed more than 11 million undocumented immigrants to become US citizens. The bill has stalled in a divided Congress. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar on July 8 asked the Supreme Court for an emergency stay of the 5th Circuit’s action, writing in a brief that the Tipton decision has upended the agency. “Thousands of DHS employees across the Nation have been told to ignore their training and stop heeding the Secretary’s directives,” he wrote in the request. “This crisis reverses the Secretary’s direction in the Department he leads and disrupts DHS’s efforts to focus its limited resources on the non-citizens who pose the greatest threat to national security, public safety, and the integrity of our Nation’s borders.” . Mayorkas said his policy guidelines instructed agents to set priorities as he did as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles years ago. He said the agency has limited resources and should use them effectively to make communities and borders safer. “Is the grandmother who came into this country 30 years ago, who has cleaned out our neighbors’ houses to make a better life for her US citizen grandchildren, really a threat to public safety?” he said in an interview in September when the guidelines were released. ICE deportations and arrests fell to their lowest levels in the agency’s history last fiscal year. Officers working inside the United States made about 74,000 administrative arrests, a decrease from 104,000 the previous year and an average of 148,000 annually from 2017 to 2019. Texas and Louisiana say enforcement has remained low, despite heightened border concerns that Republicans associate with Biden’s softer immigration policies. They disputed the administration’s claim that it lacks adequate funding to detain and deport immigrants, noting that the president’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year calls for a “dramatic reduction” in detention beds from 34,000 to 25,000. “It would be particularly troubling to allow petitioners to ignore congressional orders under the present circumstances because the facts show that the problem is, at least in part, self-inflicted,” the states wrote to the Supreme Court, opposing the government’s request for a accommodation. Daniel Bible, deputy executive associate director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, said in a government affidavit that it would be “impossible” for the agency to detain everyone eligible for deportation. ICE has 6,000 immigration officers, 34,000 detention beds and, as of early June, more than 4 million undocumented immigrants in its caseload, including 327,000 people with criminal histories.
