WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday handed Texas and Louisiana a temporary victory, allowing a federal judge to block immigration enforcement guidelines issued by the Biden administration that it said allowed the release of immigrants without criminal record papers.
In a brief order, the court did not give reasons, which is typical when judges act on emergency requests, but said it would accept an appeal of the case and hear arguments this year.
Four justices dissented: Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three Liberal members. That included Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recorded her first vote since being sworn in last month.
The guidelines, issued in September, set priorities for deciding which immigrants should be arrested and deported, focusing on “national security, public safety and border security.” But they also gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents substantial discretion in deciding whether enforcement actions were warranted.
The guidelines were part of an effort to roll back the Trump administration’s broad immigration detention policies. The ruling is likely to dramatically change how ICE operates, in part because the agency lacks the ability to detain all migrants with criminal convictions. But it was another setback for the Biden administration on immigration, which has become a political liability as officials have struggled to contain waves of migrants at the border and had to contend with numerous court battles to try to replace the hardline policies they inherited. .
The main decisions of the Supreme Court this term
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A transcendental term. The US Supreme Court issued several important decisions during its last term, including rulings on abortion, guns and religion. Here are some of the key cases:
School prayer In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court ruled that a Washington public high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.
Separation of church and state. In Carson v. Makin, the court ruled that a Maine program that excludes religious schools from a state tuition program is a violation of the free exercise of religion.
Biden administration officials have said it is necessary for ICE to set priorities in light of the fact that there are more than 11 million noncitizens in the United States and that the federal government does not have the resources to detain them and try to deport them all.
Texas and Louisiana filed suit to block the guidelines, which they said allowed many immigrants with criminal records to remain free while their cases progress, placing burdens on the states’ justice systems.
Judge Drew B. Tipton of the Federal District Court in Victoria, Texas, agreed and issued a ruling blocking the use of the guidelines nationwide. A unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans declined to stay the sentence.
The group, in an unsigned opinion, said the Department of Homeland Security had given undue weight to political considerations in a memorandum outlining the administration’s approach.
“For example,” the panel wrote, “the guidelines are expected to be essential to advancing this administration’s stated commitment to advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have historically have been ill-served, marginalized and negatively affected by persistent poverty and inequality'”.
“DHS’s substitution of congressional statutory mandates for equity and race concerns is extralegal, given that these policy concerns are clearly outside the bounds of the power conferred by” the immigration laws, the panel wrote.
In a separate but nearly identical case brought by three other states (Arizona, Montana and Ohio), a unanimous three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati reached the opposite conclusion.
Chief Justice Jeffrey S. Sutton, writing for the panel, said the guidelines were consistent with the approaches of previous administrations. “Federal law gives the national government considerable authority over immigration policy,” he wrote.
In a request for emergency Supreme Court relief in the case brought by Texas and Louisiana, Attorney General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that Judge Tipton’s ruling was “disrupting DHS’s efforts to focus its limited resources in the non-citizens who represent the most serious threat to the national population”. safety, public safety, and integrity of our nation’s borders.”
Ms. Prelogar also suggested that the court treat the stay request as a request to take the case before any final judgment in the lower courts. The unsigned order said the court would do so, setting arguments for “the first week of the December 2022 argument session.”
Ms. Prelogar had also suggested the court could use the case to curb what she called “a troubling trend” of states suing the federal government.
“For most of our nation’s history, a lawsuit like this would have been unheard of,” Ms. Preface, adding: “Courts have not allowed states to sue the federal government based on the indirect and downstream effects of federal policies.”
More recently, he wrote, such outfits have become commonplace. California filed 122 lawsuits against the Trump administration, or about one every two weeks, he wrote, while Texas has sued the Biden administration 27 times, with 11 of the lawsuits involving immigration.
Ms. Prelogar also questioned the national reach of Judge Tipton’s ruling, saying it gave the three states in the other case “the same relief that the Sixth Circuit denied them in their own lawsuit.”
In response, lawyers for Texas and Louisiana wrote that the states had suffered direct and specific injuries that gave them standing to sue, adding that federal law required the administration to detain immigrants whose guidelines allowed them to be released .
Charlie Savage and Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.