Dem
51
GOP
49
The Trump White House in general, and White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller in particular, hated Mexican immigrants. And so, they used the pandemic as an excuse to impose a pretty draconian border policy. Title 42, using an... aggressive reading of the president's powers in time of a public-health crisis, has allowed for millions of asylum seekers to be turned away at the border without ever having a chance to even make their case for entry.
Given that the legal basis for Title 42 is at least somewhat shaky, and given that the pandemic is now more like an endemic, there have been a number of lawsuits challenging the policy. One of those lawsuits came from the Biden administration, which wants to put the policy aside. Various levels of the federal system have imposed and removed stays while the matter is resolved. As is usual in these circumstances, the matter eventually landed in the laps of the Supreme Court.
Yesterday, the Supremes made their decision. Not on the underlying legal questions, mind you, but on whether or not the law could be put aside for now. And their answer was: No. It was a 5-4 vote, with the three liberals and Neil Gorsuch the dissenters. Two of the liberals did not explain their reasoning, but Ketanji Brown Jackson said that "the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis," and Gorsuch agreed.
It is regrettable that the Biden administration, which is being flayed for its lack of border control, cannot implement its own border policy, as opposed to being stuck with the not-exactly-successful policy of its predecessor. We suspect that Team Biden has concluded that if you turn legal asylum-seekers away, they don't go back to the place they fled, they just find a way to enter the U.S. illegally. In any event, this is what the White House is going to have to work with for, quite probably, most of the rest of Biden's first term. (Z)