Nurses show a “Stay Home” sign on their vehicle during a caravan of nurses calling for people to stay home amid an increase in COVID-19 cases in El Paso on November 16, 2020 in El Paso , Texas.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
A Texas federal judge ruled Thursday evening that the national ban on evictions in effect since September is unconstitutional.
“While the Covid-19 pandemic persists, so does the Constitution,” wrote U.S. District Judge John Barker, along with a group of property managers who argued that the ban exceeds government power. federal.
The national moratorium on eviction from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was first announced under former President Donald Trump in September 2020. It banned evicting tenants who were struggling financially because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Since then, President Joe Biden has extended the moratorium until March and the latest stimulus package for the works would remain in place until September 2021.
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The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Landlords have criticized the CDC moratorium, saying the government is overstepping its authority and cannot afford to house unpaid tenants. There have also been court challenges to the moratorium in Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee, although they were unsuccessful.
Proponents of the ban quickly attacked the sentence and feared it would trigger a flood of eviction files. They say winter storms that have caused massive power outages across Texas will only make the situation worse.
“This decision is a significant deviation from the rest of the district court decisions that upheld the CDC moratorium as constitutional,” said Emily Benfer, a visiting law professor at Wake Forest University.