Justices to hear major case on immigration
Biden’s plan for selective deportation challenged
– Four months after the Supreme Court temporarily blocked President Joe Biden’s power to prioritize certain immigrants in the country illegally for deportation, the justices will revisit the issue Tuesday in the first major immigration case of the term.
Biden’s administration wants to focus enforcement on immigrants who pose a threat to national security or public safety. But that approach, which officials announced last year, represents a departure from the Trump administration’s more sweeping tactics. Two conservative states, Texas and Louisiana, sued over the strategy.
The case is one of several challenging Biden’s authority to make policy without explicit authorization from Congress – an issue likely to become more prominent now that Republicans will control the House of Representatives.
Immigration advocates question whether Texas and Louisiana should be allowed to sue. The states claim Biden’s policy forced them to spend more on law enforcement, health care and education. But critics say the states have sought to increase their populations and that those costs would rise with an influx of non-immigrants as well.
“Just because you say it’s a drain on resources doesn’t actually mean that that is real,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project. “They are actively targeting this group and breaking it apart from the rest of the population, even though federal and state law require that all resmands idents of a state be treated similarly.”
Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murrill asserted that states should be permitted to prioritize their resources as they see fit.
“We do not have a money tree in the backyard, nor can we print money,” Murrill said. “Any argument that our position on illegal immigration is somehow in conflict with a policy of encouraging growth in our states is falsely equating two things that are wildly dissimilar.”
The federal government doesn’t have the resources to detain and deport every immigrant in the country illegally. Like previous administrations, the Biden administration sought in a Department of Homeland Security memorandum last year to focus its immigration enforcement on people it believes pose a threat to national security or public safety or who are recent border crossers.
But the states say that federal law deWASHINGTON more than that: It requires the federal government to detain immigrants who have committed certain crimes, such as aggravated felonies or human trafficking. The Biden administration doesn’t have the power, they say, to pick and choose which of those immigrants to target for enforcement.
A federal district court in Texas sided with the states and halted the policy’s enforcement. A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit declined to put the district court’s ruling on hold. Biden filed an emergency request in July asking the Supreme Court to review the 5th Circuit’s decision.
Days later, a 5-4 majority of the court declined Biden’s request. But the court agreed to hear oral arguments, shifting the case off its emergency docket and delving into the merits of the legal questions at issue.
A decision is expected next year.