Title 42 is the immigration policy put in place during the Trump administration to curb the spread of the virus. It allows authorities to send illegal migrants back over the border without the chance to file for asylum. Despite campaigning on a promise to end the policy – President Biden has kept Title 42 in place, dividing Democrats on how to proceed.
As Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette explains, President Biden bought some time when the Supreme Court, just days before Title 42 was set to expire, ruled in favor of keeping it in place until the court debates the issue in February.
Put simply, every time Republicans act like big jerks on immigration, they let Democrats get away with being smaller jerks on immigration. What a great system, right? That’s a telenovela that played out recently at the Supreme Court where a majority of the justices gave a temporary reprieve to Title 42, a section of U.S. Code that former President Donald Trump used in 2020 to keep out migrants, supposedly to stop the spread of COVID-19. The high court ruled that the policy, which had been ordered terminated by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., should remain in place for the time being. The justices said they would hear arguments in the case in February, and that the state would remain in place until then. This was the wrong decision.
But Justice Neil Gorsuch, who broke with his conservative colleagues to side with three liberals on the court, got it right. The Supreme Court, Gorsuch said in his dissent, is a court of law that should not go around making public policy. Good on him. The fact that Title 42 got spared is good news for the 19 Republican-led states that went to court to protect the measure, because they fear that once it’s gone, immigrants will flit across the U.S.-Mexican border, and they’ll have to deal with it. But it’s great news for the Biden administration, which refused to end the policy even though Joe Biden promised to do so because officials fear that once it’s gone, immigrants will flit across the U.S.-Mexico border, and they’ll catch the blame for it.
The White House is running a scam. That’s how it looks to George Mason University Professor Justin Gust who studies the politics of immigration. “The ruling brings a sense of relief that administration officials may not publicly acknowledge,” Gest told The New York Times. Whether they acknowledge it or not and whether the liberal media and left-wing advocacy groups call them out or not, that’s what’s happening. So who’s the bigger villain here? The Republicans who stab immigrants and those who defend them in the front, or the Democrats who prefer to stab them in the back?
