WASHINGTON – Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a challenge to the Biden administration’s efforts to end a Trump-era immigration program that forces asylum seekers arriving at the southwest border to wait approval in Mexico.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. he wrote the majority opinion, along with Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh and the three Liberal members of the court. Judge Amy Coney Barrett agreed with much of the chief judge’s analysis.
The contested program, commonly known as Remain in Mexico and formally as Migrant Protection Protocols, applies to people who left a third country and traveled through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. After the policy was launched in early 2019, tens of thousands of people waited in unhealthy tent camps for immigration audiences. There have been widespread reports of sexual assault, kidnapping and torture.
Shortly after taking office, President Biden tried to end the program. Texas and Missouri sued, and lower courts reinstated it, ruling that federal immigration laws require the return of immigrants who arrive by land and cannot be detained while their cases are heard.
Since the Biden administration restarted the program in December, far fewer migrants have signed up than during the Trump era. This is partly because the United States agreed to take additional steps to meet certain demands from Mexico, including that migrants be sent back under the program only if there is enough reception space.
By the end of May, the Biden administration had enrolled more than 7,200 migrants in the program since December 2021. Most of those enrolled in recent months are from Nicaragua and are men.
From January 2019, when the Trump administration began the program, to the end of 2020, about 70,000 migrants were sent back to Mexico to await their court hearings, according to the American Immigration Council.
The case, Biden v. Texas, no. 21-954, was unusually complex, and involved three statutory provisions pointing in different directions.
One provision said the federal government generally “must detain” immigrants while awaiting consideration of their immigration procedures. But Congress has never allocated enough money to stop the number of people affected.
In 2021, for example, the government prosecuted some 670,000 migrants arriving on the border with Mexico, but had the capacity to detain some 34,000.
The second provision said the government “can return” migrants arriving by land in the country where they come from.
The third provision allowed the government to release migrants to the United States while awaiting their hearings “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit.”
Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the North Texas District in Amarillo ruled last year that immigration laws required noncitizens seeking asylum to return to Mexico as long as the government federal did not have the resources to stop them.
The Biden administration quickly asked the Supreme Court to intervene, but refused to block Judge Kacsmaryk’s sentence, forcing him to restart the program. The three most liberal judges disagreed.
The court’s brief, unsigned order at the time said the administration appeared to have acted arbitrarily and capriciously in terminating the program, citing a 2020 decision that had refused to allow the Trump administration to terminate immediately. an Obama-era program that protects well-known young immigrants. as Dreamers.
The Biden administration then took steps to restart the program although it issued a new decision to end it. Administration officials, responding to criticism that they had acted hastily, published a 38-page memorandum setting out their reasoning.
They concluded that the costs of the program outweighed its benefits. Among those costs, the memorandum said, were the dangerous conditions in Mexico, the difficulty immigrants had in engaging in dialogue with lawyers across the border, and the ways in which the program undermined the administration’s foreign policy goals. domestic policy initiatives.
A three-judge tribunal of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans rejected the administration’s plan to close the program.
“The government says it has irreversible and unilateral discretion to create and eliminate entire components of the federal bureaucracy that affect countless people, tax dollars, and sovereign states,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote for the panel. “The government also says it has irreversible and unilateral discretion to ignore the statutory limits imposed by Congress.”
“And the government says it can do all this by writing a new‘ memo ’and posting it on the internet,” he added. “If the government were right, it would replace the rule of law with the rule of law. We believe the government is wrong.”
Eileen Sullivan contributed to the report.