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The Supreme Court on Monday temporarily paused the Biden administration’s plan to end the Trump-era pandemic policy known as Title 42, which allowed the immediate deportation of most migrants crossing the US-Mexico border before they could try to claim asylum. A federal judge had ruled last month the government must stop the expedited deportations by today, but then a group of 19 Republican-led states appealed that ruling to the Supremes. Chief Justice John Roberts then ordered Monday that Title 42 remain in place temporarily, and asked attorneys representing the states and attorneys for the Biden administration and asylum seekers to submit briefs in the case Tuesday evening.
No telling how long the temporary extension of Title 42 will stay in place; the Republican states want it to be in place at least until the heat death of the universe, while the administration asked yesterday for the stay to be lifted after the Christmas holiday, to give officials time to get ready for an increase in people crossing the border and surrendering themselves to the Border Patrol so they can claim asylum.
Administration lawyers acknowledged that ending Title 42 would “likely lead to disruption and a temporary increase in unlawful border crossings,” but added that’s no reason to keep Title 42 in place indefinitely.
“The government in no way seeks to minimize the seriousness of that problem,” the lawyers said in their brief. “But the solution to that immigration problem cannot be to extend indefinitely a public health measure that all now acknowledge has outlived its public health justification.”
The Title 42 fuck-tussle comes immediately after Mitch McConnell killed off a promising bipartisan immigration bill that included some immigration stuff that both Republicans and Democrats wanted. The bill, cosponsored by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Arizona) and Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), wasn’t a full-scale reform of the US immigration system, but it would have broken the impasse on two major issues that there’s fairly broad bipartisan agreement on.
It would have finally resolved the status of “Dreamers” — people brought to the US when they were children by parents who crossed the border illegally — by giving them protection from deportation, the right to work and attend college, and a path to citizenship. At the border, it would have addressed much of the fuss over Title 42 by creating
new processing centers that would detain incoming asylum seekers — with increased legal and health services — until screenings could determine whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they were returned home. Those who passed would get a final hearing much faster than under the status quo, due to major investments in legal processing. Those who failed would be expelled promptly.
All this was designed to disincentivize exactly what Republicans rail about: migrants who seek asylum in hopes of disappearing into the interior and not showing up for hearings. The framework would have effectively continued the Title 42 ban on most asylum applications for at least a year, until the new system was operational.
It was a pretty good bill, but then last week McConnell told Tillis and Sinema that he wouldn’t allow it to be included in the big omnibus spending bill that should be passed by the end of this week, because Republican immigration hard-liners would absolutely oppose it and sink the omnibus. Which is a land vehicle anyway.
There’s not really much surprise there. The bill would have done real good, but oh no, it was AMNESTY, and it didn’t even demand the roundup and deportation of every last undocumented migrant here already. That latter is of course impossible, but plenty of Republicans insist that the impossible be the starting point for any immigration reform. Besides, we can’t allow any asylum claims, because all asylum seekers are just lying.
So hooray! Republicans will now take over the House in January, and they can get going on really addressing problems at the border by impeaching DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which will definitely make people stop fleeing poverty, violence, and oppression in other countries.
It would be just terrible if Republicans did something to reduce problems at the border, after all. What would they run on in 2024 (and every two years after) if they did that?
[Heather Cox Richardson / NYT / WaPo / Photo: Mani Albrecht, public domain]
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