WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court handed a temporary victory to Texas and Louisiana on Thursday, allowing a federal judge to block immigration enforcement guidelines issued by the Biden administration that it says allow the release of undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
In a brief order, the court did not give reasons, which is typical when judges act on urgent requests, but said it would consider an appeal of the case and hear arguments this year.
Four justices dissented: Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three Liberal members. That includes Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who recorded her first vote since being sworn in last month.
The guidelines, issued in September, set priorities for deciding which immigrants to arrest and deport, focusing on “national security, public safety and border security.” But they also gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials considerable discretion in deciding whether enforcement action was warranted.
The guidelines were part of an effort to roll back the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration detention policies. The ruling likely won’t dramatically change the way ICE operates, in part because the agency doesn’t have the capacity to detain all migrants with criminal convictions. But it was another setback for the Biden administration on immigration, which has become a political liability as officials have struggled to contain waves of migrants at the border and have had to fight multiple court battles to try to replace hardline policies , who inherited .
The main decisions of the Supreme Court during this term
Card 1 of 7
An important term. The US Supreme Court issued several important decisions during its last term, including rulings on abortion, guns and religion. Here are some of the key cases:
School prayer. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court ruled that a Washington public high school football coach has a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.
Separation of church and state. In Carson v. Makin, the court ruled that a program in Maine that excluded religious schools from the state curriculum was a violation of the free exercise of religion.
Biden administration officials said ICE needed to set priorities in light of the fact that there are more than 11 million noncitizens in the United States and that the federal government does not have the resources to capture them and seek to deport them all.
Texas and Louisiana have sued to block the guidelines, which they say allow many immigrants with criminal records to remain free while their cases move forward, putting a burden on state court systems.
Judge Drew B. Tipton of the Federal District Court in Victoria, Texas, agreed, issuing a ruling that blocked the use of the guidelines nationwide. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans declined to stay the decision.
The panel, in an unsigned opinion, said the Department of Homeland Security placed inappropriate weight on political considerations in a memorandum outlining the administration’s approach.
“For example,” the panel wrote, “it provides that the guidance ‘is essential to advancing this administration’s stated commitment to promoting equity for all, including people of color and others who have historically been underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected. from persistent poverty and inequality.
“DHS’s substitution of congressional statutory mandates for considerations of fairness and race is unconstitutional, given that such policy concerns are clearly outside the bounds of authority granted by” immigration laws, the panel wrote.
In a separate but nearly identical case brought by three other states — Arizona, Montana and Ohio — a unanimous three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati reached the opposite conclusion.
Chief Justice Jeffrey S. Sutton, writing for the panel, said the guidelines were consistent with the approaches of previous administrations. “Federal law gives the national government considerable authority over immigration policy,” he wrote.
In a request for emergency Supreme Court relief in the case brought by Texas and Louisiana, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that Judge Tipton’s ruling “impedes DHS’s efforts to focus its limited resources on the noncitizens who pose the most serious threat for national security, public safety, and the integrity of our nation’s borders.”
Ms. Prelogar also suggested that the court treat the stay request as a petition to hear the case before a possible final decision in the lower courts. The unsigned order says the court will do so by setting arguments for “the first week of the December 2022 argument session.”
Ms. Prelogar also suggested the court could use the case to curb what she called a “disturbing trend” of states suing the federal government.
“For most of our nation’s history, such a claim would have been unheard of,” Ms. Prelogar wrote, adding, “Courts have not allowed states to sue the federal government based on the indirect, trickle-down effects of federal policies.”
More recently, she writes, such costumes have become commonplace. California filed 122 lawsuits against the Trump administration, or about one every two weeks, she wrote, while Texas sued the Biden administration 27 times, with 11 of the cases involving immigration.
Ms. Prelogar also questioned the national reach of Judge Tipton’s decision, saying it gave the three states in the other case “the very relief they were denied by the Sixth Circuit in their own action.”
In response, attorneys for Texas and Louisiana wrote that the states have suffered direct and specific injuries that give them standing to sue, adding that federal law requires the administration to detain immigrants whose guidelines allow them to be released.
Charlie Savage and Eileen Sullivan contributed reporting.
Add Comment