The Supreme Court on Friday upheld key parts of President Biden’s plan for targeted immigration enforcement, ruling that the administration may focus on arresting and deporting people who pose the current danger. .
In an 8-1 ruling, the judges said Texas and Louisiana were ineligible to sue over enforcement policy.
Writing for the court, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote, “States basically want federal law enforcement to order the executive branch to change arrest policies to make more arrests. But , this court has long held that “a citizen is ineligible to challenge prosecutorial policy unless he himself has been prosecuted or threatened with prosecution.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. dissented alone.
The decision in For USA vs Texas It does not include the tens of thousands of migrants arriving at borders or the millions of migrants living in the country without legal documents.
Instead, the issue is which immigrants have past crimes on record and whether the government should hunt them down for arrest and deportation.
Republican state attorneys and Democratic administrations are embroiled in controversy over immigration enforcement.
Last year, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to deny Mr. Biden’s immigration enforcement guidelines into force, but the judges agreed to hear arguments over legal disputes.
At issue is whether the law will require forced detention of immigrants with serious criminal records, or instead allow the administration to focus on arresting and deporting people who are now a public safety risk. or
Immigrants often serve years in state prisons for crimes such as drug trafficking. After release, they may be detained by federal immigration officers, but not automatically.
Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorcas said the government: We had no choice but to prioritize immigration law enforcement.
“The law establishes that federal officials have broad discretion over who to arrest, detain, deport, and enforce deportation orders,” he said last September. rice field. He said the crackdown should focus on “non-citizens who currently pose a threat to public safety” rather than on everyone with a criminal record.
But Texas Athi. General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against a law requiring the government to arrest, detain, and deport people that Congress calls “criminal aliens,” including those with “aggravated felony” records. woke up
He took the case to President Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton of Corpus Christi, Texas. A judge issued a nationwide order declaring the administration’s enforcement policies illegal and unusable.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected the order last July, and the Supreme Court did the same in a 5-4 vote in July.
