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A federal appeals court denied a request Friday by Republican-led states to delay lifting an emergency health order that the federal government has used for more than two years to quickly turn away immigrants, including those seeking asylum, at the border southwest.
The US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, denied a request by 19 Republican-led states, including Texas, that had asked the three-judge panel to delay lifting the order – known as Title 42 – on 21 December. The judges said the states’ request came too late in the process. States can appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Last month, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the US District Court in Washington, DC, ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s use of the order to prevent people from entering the asylum process is “arbitrary and capricious” and a violation of the law because it was not properly implemented. Sullivan ordered the Biden administration to immediately repeal Title 42, then agreed to give the federal government until Dec. 21 to make preparations.
The Biden administration said it would meet the Dec. 21 deadline, but also appealed Sullivan’s decision, saying it disagreed that the initial implementation of Title 42 was illegal.
The CDC under the Trump administration invoked Title 42 in March 2020 — at the start of the U.S. coronavirus pandemic — for the first time since its creation in 1944, and said it was a necessary step to help stop the spread of COVID-19. in immigration detention centers, where many immigrants are placed after reaching the US-Mexico border. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has since said that immigrants are not increasing the number of COVID-19 cases.
Immigration officials have used the health order more than 2 million times to deport immigrants, many of whom have been removed multiple times after making repeated attempts to enter the U.S. Under Title 42, the recidivism rate — the percentage of people caught more than once by a Border Patrol Agent – has increased from 7% to 27% since fiscal year 2019.
Sullivan’s decision stems from a lawsuit filed in January 2021 by the American Civil Liberties Union and two Texas-based immigrant rights groups that argued Title 42 violated U.S. asylum laws and that the Trump administration used the pandemic as a pretext to called Title 42 and to use it. as a means of immigration.
Initially, the Biden administration had planned to remove Title 42 in May.
But when the CDC announced it was allowing the health order to expire, Arizona and more than a dozen other states filed a federal lawsuit April 3 in the Western District of Louisiana, asking a judge to stop the government from repealing Title 42. Texas filed a separate lawsuit on April 22 seeking the same.
In May, US District Judge Robert R. Summerhays in Louisiana blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42. The administration appealed, and the case remains pending in the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals.
