Court denies GOP states’ motion to delay end of Title 42 of the Demarcations

Washington – A federal appeals court on Friday declined to delay the lifting of pandemic-era border restrictions that are due to end next week, dismissing a motion by Republican state officials who had warned the policy will end, known as Title 42will fuel a larger surge in migrant arrivals along the US southern border.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused to stay a lower court ruling ordering the federal government to stop deporting migrants under the public health measure on December 21.

Unless superseded by a Supreme Court decision, next week’s appeals court decision will pave the way for ending the Title 42 expulsion policy. The 19 Republican-led states are trying to delay the end of Title 42 previously said They would ask the Supreme Court to intervene if the Washington Court of Appeals denied their request.

Title 42, first claimed by the Trump administration in March 2020 at the dawn of the coronavirus pandemic, is a late 19th-century public health law that the federal government says allows border officials to quickly deport migrants from the United States that they could spread an infectious disease.

Citing Title 42, U.S. border officials under Presidents Trump and Biden have deported migrants to Mexico or their home country 2.5 million times without allowing them to seek humanitarian protection, a right afforded asylum-seekers by U.S. and international law Have refugee rights, information from the federal government show.

While reversing other Trump-era border policies, the Biden administration continued with Title 42 deportations and has relied on the measure to manage an unprecedented flow of hundreds of thousands of migrants who have crossed the border between the United States over the past year the USA and Mexico have arrived halfway.

The emergency request, approved Friday, was filed by Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

The three-judge panel reviewing the Republican-controlled states’ request said the states had waited too long to try to intervene in the Title 42 legality case, which was filed in early 2021 following a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union began. The ACLU has argued the policy is unlawful and violates the rights of asylum seekers.

“In this case, the unreasonable and inexplicable delay in states’ requests to intervene in the appeal speaks strongly against intervention,” the panel wrote in its four-page statement on Friday.

The court-ordered repeal of Title 42 next week has alarmed Republican lawmakers and some moderate Democrats, who have expressed concern about the Biden administration’s preparations for the surge in migrant arrivals that is expected to occur after the measure is repealed.

In fiscal 2022, U.S. officials stopped migrants along the Mexico border more than 2.3 million times, a record high, and carried out just over 1 million Title 42 evictions, government data shows. In recent days, the Texas border town of El Paso has seen a sharp increase in Nicaraguan migrant arrivals tense the local protection system.

But progressives and pro-migrant advocates have said the end of Title 42 will allow the Biden administration to fully comply with its legal obligation to review the cases of all asylum seekers on US soil. They have argued that Title 42 made migrants easy targets for harassment in dangerous parts of northern Mexico.

Since the Biden administration took office in January 2021, human rights researchers have registered over 13,000 reports of kidnappings, rapes and other attacks on migrants stranded in Mexico, according to a report released Friday by Human Rights First, a US-based advocacy group.

“Ending Title 42 will save lives,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU attorney who challenged the pandemic rule, told CBS News. “This is not a technical abstract policy. It sends families with young children straight into the hands of waiting cartels.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, has insisted it is ready to rescind Title 42 next week. It has also argued that implementing regular immigration procedures, such as deportations accompanied by multi-year bans under US immigration law, and prosecuting repeat border crossers will gradually reduce the high rate of illegal border crossings.

Since its passage, Title 42 has resulted in a high rate of repeat border crossings among adult migrants who repeatedly attempt to enter the United States after being deported to Mexico. The Biden administration said that once repeat offenders are at risk of imprisonment, prosecution, or exile from the United States for several years, the rate of recidivism will be lowered

“To be clear, the repeal of the Title 42 public health ordinance does not mean the border is open,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said in a statement to CBS News. “Anyone who suggests otherwise is doing the work of smugglers spreading misinformation to make a quick buck off vulnerable migrants.”

Track 42 was first approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March 2020. While Trump administration officials presented the rule as a measure to respond to a pandemic, Title 42 was approved the objection by CDC experts who questioned the public health rationale for the unprecedented policy.

Despite lifting some Trump-era asylum and border restrictions, the Biden administration chose to retain Title 42 and defended it, including in federal courts, as a crucial public health rule to contain COVID-19 outbreaks.

The Biden administration attempted to end Title 42 in spring 2022, citing the improving pandemic environment — and declining coronavirus infections — but a coalition of Republican-led states persuaded a federal court in Louisiana to end the policy to block for procedural reasons.

Then, on Nov. 15, another federal judge in Washington, DC, ruled Title 42 illegal, saying the government failed to adequately explain the public health rationale for the measure or consider its impact on asylum seekers.

In a filing in a separate court filing Friday, the Biden administration said it was prepared to comply with the ruling and officially end the deportations at 12 p.m. EST Wednesday.

The agency is training volunteers to conduct an increased number of interviews with asylum-seekers after Title 42 expires, according to an internal memo by senior US Citizenship and Immigration Services official Ted Kim on Friday. These talks determine whether migrants have credible fears of persecution and are allowed to apply for asylum.

So are officials in the Biden administration in view of the adoption of certain measures to deter migration, including an asylum restriction that would make migrants ineligible for US protection unless they seek refuge in other countries first. These measures could be accompanied by expanded opportunities for asylum seekers to enter the country legally if they have US-based financial sponsors.