Supreme Court says Biden cannot reinstate policy limiting ICE arrests, for now [View all]

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused 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 laws. The court instead said it will hear 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) officers to prioritize the detention of recent border crossers 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 farmworkers picking crops and grandmothers caring for American children. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that being present in the country without authorization “should not alone be the basis” for arrest or removal, a switch from the Trump administration’s view.

Republican attorneys general across the country filed suits, and those in Texas and Louisiana were successful. Judge Drew Tipton in Texas agreed with the argument 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 been given a recent deportation order.

Tipton, appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump, sided with the states and vacated the ICE priorities, leaving the agency without any operational guidelines. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the administration’s plea to put Tipton’s order on hold while it considered the case’s merits. That was the opposite of what a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit found when it considered a nearly identical case filed by Arizona, Montana and Ohio.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/21/supreme-court-biden-ice-immigration-enforcement/