The Biden administration on Saturday stopped its limits on immigration arrests to comply with a court ruling that went into effect over the weekend, leaving U.S. deportation agents without official instructions on which immigrants should and should not to stop.
In September 2021, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to arrest immigrants who were considered a threat to public safety or national security, and migrants who recently crossed a U.S. border illegally.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents question and detain undocumented immigrants during a traffic stop after a checkpoint in the morning, Wednesday, January 8, 2020. Eamon Queeney / For The Washington Post via Getty Images
The rules, part of a broader effort by the Biden administration to reshape the ICE’s immigration enforcement functions, generally protected unauthorized immigrants who arrived in the United States before November 2020. arrest and deportation if they had not committed serious crimes.
But Republican officials in Texas and Louisiana earlier this month convinced a federal judge to set aside Mayorkas rules on the premise that he did not have the authority to issue them. U.S. Judge Drew Tipton, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, also said Mayorkas’ note was incorrectly enacted.
Tipton agreed to stop his decision to give the administration time to appeal, and the Justice Department asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to suspend his order. But the appellate court did not issue a ruling on the government’s request before Tipton paused on its decision Saturday morning.
In a statement to CBS News on Saturday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was not “strongly” at odds with Tipton’s order, but that it was complying with it.
“During the appeals process, ICE agents and officers will make enforcement decisions on a case-by-case basis in a professional and responsible manner, informed by their experience as law enforcement officials and in the way that best protects against the biggest threats to people. homeland, “the department said.
While the suspension of the ICE’s detention prioritization scheme is unlikely to put the country’s estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in immediate danger of arrest, the absence of national standards could lead to actions of inconsistent enforcement in the United States, including the arrests of immigrants to whom officers previously received instructions. do not stop, legal experts said.
Muzaffar Chishti, a senior member of the Nonpartisan Institute of Migration Policy, said ICE agents will still have the discretion of law enforcement to decide whether to make arrests. But he said national rules will no longer prevent officers from arresting immigrants whom the Biden administration tried to protect from deportation.
Without national rules, Chishti said, there will likely be significant “variations” in the way the different ICE field offices make the arrests. ICE officials in Atlanta, for example, could try to maximize arrests, he added.
“People in jurisdictions that have historically been more prone to enforcement are more afraid now than those in jurisdictions that have a more balanced approach to enforcement,” said Chishti, who heads the New York office. of the Institute of Migration Policies.
ICE and DHS representatives did not provide additional details on how officers will decide whether to make arrests in the absence of enforcement priorities.
The note suspended over the weekend is part of a series of rules the Biden administration has issued to reduce groups of immigrants subject to ICE arrests in the interior of the country. Under President Biden, the ICE has been instructed to avoid, in general, the detention of families with children, pregnant or nursing women, victims of serious crimes, and U.S. Army veterans.
The Biden administration has also disrupted large-scale ICE arrests in workplaces and expanded the list of so-called “protected areas” where deportation officers generally should not arrest immigrants to include disaster sites. , places where children and social service establishments meet.
Mr Biden’s appointees have argued that policy changes allow ICE’s 6,000 deportation officers to use their limited resources to arrest immigrants who endanger public safety or national security. Republicans, however, have denounced the rules as too restrictive and argued that they encourage illegal immigration.
The court ruling blocking the ICE’s implementation priorities is the latest judicial victory for conservative states that have tried to obstruct Mr Biden’s immigration and border policies.
Through multiple lawsuits, Texas and other Republican-led states have forced the administration to rule out a 100-day deportation moratorium, closing the Deferred Action for Arrivals in Children (DACA) program to new applicants and reactivating a Trump-era policy that forces migrants to wait. their asylum hearings in Mexico.
In May, a federal judge accepted a request from more than 20 Republican-led states and ordered the Biden administration to continue using a public health law first invoked under Mr. Trump to quickly expel some migrants. of the US-Mexico border. The administration had argued that the emergency policy, known as Title 42, was no longer necessary to control COVID-19.
More Camilo Montoya-Galvez
Camilo Montoya-Galvez is the immigration journalist for CBS News. Based in Washington, it covers immigration policy and policy.