WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a court ruling ordering the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era policy that forces it to wait in Mexico while seeking asylum in the U.S.
With the three Liberal judges at odds, the court said the administration is likely to violate federal law in its efforts to terminate the program known informally as Permanent in Mexico.
It is unclear how many people will be affected and how quickly. According to the lower court ruling, the administration must make a “good faith effort” to restart the program.
A Texas federal judge had previously ordered that the program, formally called Migrant Protection Protocols, be reinstated last week. Both he and the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States rejected the administration’s request to suspend the sentence.
Judge Samuel Alito ordered a brief delay to allow the entire court to consider the administration’s appeal to keep the sentence pending as the case continues to make its way to the courts.
The 5th Circuit ordered that the administration’s appeal be quickly considered.
The court offered few explanations for his action, though he cited his opinion last year rejecting the Trump administration’s effort to end another immigration program, the deferred action for arrivals in childhood. In this case, the court held that the decision to end DACA was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of federal law.
The administration “has not demonstrated the likelihood of success in stating that the memorandum terminating migrant protection protocols was not arbitrary and capricious,” the court wrote Tuesday in an unsigned order.
The three dissenting judges did not write any opinion expressing their opinion on the case.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, politics demanded that tens of thousands of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. return to Mexico. It was intended to discourage asylum seekers, but critics said it denied people the legal right to seek protection in the U.S. and forced them to wait in dangerous Mexican border cities.
The judge, U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, ordered that the program be reinstated in response to a lawsuit filed by the states of Texas and Missouri, whose governors have been trying to reinstate some of the state’s policies. Trump administration.
The Biden administration argued briefly that the president has “clear authority to determine immigration policy” and that National Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had the discretion in deciding whether to return the sun. asylum bidders in Mexico.
In its brief submitted to the Supreme Court on Friday, the administration argued that the policy had been inactive for more than a year and that abruptly restoring it “would harm U.S. relations with vital regional partners and severely alter their operations on the southern border, and threaten to create a diplomatic and humanitarian crisis. ”
The Trump administration stopped using the “Rest in Mexico” policy to a large extent at the beginning of the pandemic, at which point virtually everyone crossing the southwestern border began to retreat under a different protocol: an order of public health that remains in force. The Biden administration said pre-pandemic policy had been “largely latent” for months even before the outbreak of COVID-19.
President Joe Biden suspended the program on his first day in office and the Department of Homeland Security ended it in June.
Kacsmaryk was nominated to the federal bench by Trump. The fifth panel of the circuit that ruled Thursday night included two Trump nominees, Andrew Oldham and Cory Wilson, along with Jennifer Walker Elrod, nominated in appeals court by President George W. Bush.