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The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected an attempt by Republican-led states to defend a Trump-era immigration policy that made it difficult for immigrants to obtain green cards, which has been abandoned by the Biden administration.
In a one-sentence order, the court dismissed the Arizona state-led case as “improvised.” This means that after the oral arguments in the case in February, the judges decided that they should not have been involved in the first place.
The Supreme Court is questioning the actions of the Biden administration over the immigration rule
But in an unusual concurring opinion, Justice President John G. Roberts Jr. he accused the Biden administration of apparent skill in abandoning the rule after lower courts ruled. He raised questions – shared by other judges when the court heard oral arguments in the case – about whether the administration was evading the legal requirements that apply when a presidential administration leaves without a policy from its predecessor.
The administration’s “maneuvers” could be seen as an attempt to avoid judicial review of whether “government actions, taken as a whole, conform to the principles of administrative law,” Roberts wrote.
He said, however, that a “mare’s nest” of procedural problems prevented the court from making that decision, and his words seemed more like a warning for the future. Judges Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.
The court has yet to rule before the end of the term on another case of the Biden administration involving immigration. These are lower court decisions that have prevented the administration from ending a “stay in Mexico” requirement imposed by Trump that keeps asylum seekers on the southern border outside the United States while their cases are resolved. .
The Biden administration is telling judges that they should be able to end the “stay in Mexico” rule.
Wednesday’s case was about President Donald Trump’s 2019 “public burden” rule, which denied green cards to immigrants if they relied too heavily on welfare programs such as food stamps. It was in effect for about a year, but courts across the country tried it in violation of federal immigration law, and an Illinois district judge in November 2020 said it could not be implemented. the whole country.
Deputy Attorney General Brian Fletcher told the Supreme Court in an oral argument that the Biden administration agreed with the lower courts and that the rule was also ineffective. “We know it only affected about five of the approximately 50,000 state adjustment applications that were applied,” Fletcher said.
The Biden administration accepted the Illinois judge’s decision and decided to dismiss the remaining cases nationwide. This left states in favor of the public burden rule and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) tried to intervene on behalf of other Republican-led states.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which covers the West, rejected it for several reasons.
The merits of the rule were not before the Supreme Court, and Roberts noted that the Illinois judge’s decision was still being appealed. He said the court’s action in the Arizona case “should not be taken as a reflection of a view” on procedural issues, “or on the appropriate resolution of other litigation, pending or future, related with the Public Charge Rule of 2019, its repeal, or its replacement by a new rule ”.
The case is Arizona v. San Francisco.