Biden Admin Asks Supreme Court To Drop Title 42 Immigration Case

Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Biden administration urged the Supreme Court on Feb. 7 to dismiss 19 states’ challenge to the cancellation of the pandemic-era Title 42 policy that allows rapid expulsion of would-be migrants at the border.

The administration argued that its plan to terminate the public health emergency on May 11 would make the case moot. The high court will hear the appeal on March 1.

Open-borders and humanitarian groups say the Title 42 policy prevents those fleeing persecution and violence in their home countries from obtaining legal due process when they arrive in the United States; however, the states say withdrawing the policy would flood already overburdened border facilities with even more illegal aliens.

The states previously told the high court that failing to uphold the policy “will cause a crisis of unprecedented proportions at the border” and that “daily illegal crossings may more than double.”

Before he left office in early January, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, one of the architects of the legal strategy to keep the policy alive, told The Epoch Times that the states were intervening because the federal government was failing to maintain order at the border.

“And the bottom line is … that if [President] Joe Biden is not going to do his job, then [we] have to do everything we can. Because what is going on at our southern border, obviously, is costing us not only fiscally, but it’s costing us in human lives lost. And so it is a life and death issue,” Brnovich, a Republican, said at the time.

Days before that, the Supreme Court blocked the rescission of the policy, which has been used to expel more than 2 million individuals, and scheduled oral arguments in the case, Arizona v. Mayorkas, for March 1.

“The anticipated end of the public health emergency on May 11, and the resulting expiration of the operative Title 42 order, would render this case moot,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar stated in a filing (pdf) with the court on Feb. 7.

Responding to Republican proposals in Congress to end the national emergency and public health emergency that were declared by the Trump administration three years ago, Biden’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said on Jan. 30 that it would extend the soon-to-expire emergencies to May 11 “and then end both emergencies on that date.”

Ending the twin emergency declarations would curb some of the federal agencies’ expansive powers in managing the government’s response to the COVID-19 virus and return agency operations to something closer to normal. Republicans, who took over the U.S. House of Representatives last month, say the emergencies aren’t justified and should be ended sooner.

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