Supreme Court Grants Temporary Reprieve to Biden Immigration Policy

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the injunction on the priorities of Mr. Biden’s arrest, calling it “another Texas win over Biden.”

Texas is a party in both cases and this year has borne the brunt of the unusually high number of illegal border crossings, with many migrant families and children from Central America arriving in the state’s Rio Grande Valley and overwhelming border officials. The state has taken several measures to challenge the immigration policies of the Biden government; Earlier this summer, Republican Governor Greg Abbott ordered state law enforcement agencies to arrest migrants for trespassing in order to tackle illegal immigration – because, he said, the Biden administration did not.

Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, has worked to devise permanent arrest priorities for ICE that would replace the tentative ones currently under attack. It was not immediately clear whether the judge’s ruling would apply to the administration’s final arrest priorities.

If the Biden government cannot continue with its immigration arrest strategy, the postponement will likely put further strain on an immigration detention system that is already near to capacity. ICE arrests have so far decreased by more than half this year compared to the same period in 2020, according to immigration statistics, in part due to pandemic-related rules to limit the number of people in meeting places and temporary arrest priorities.

Mr Wong said that even if Republicans were to challenge arrest priorities, it would not change the fact that there was not enough room.

“And so the policy of ‘enforcement en masse’ does not take into account finite resources,” he said, “including limited detention facilities.”

The government is also waiting for a judge to rule on a lawsuit that would prevent them from continuing a public health rule that the Trump administration put in place at the start of the pandemic to help many asylum-seeking families arriving at the border to refuse. Immigration advocates filed the lawsuit last year, when Vice President Kamala Harris, then a Senator from California and a presidential candidate, argued against the rule.