The Biden administration made an emergency request to the Supreme Court late Friday asking it to block a lower court ruling requiring restoration of President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy.
Without a stay, Homeland Security will be forced to start pushing illegal immigrants back across the border rather than catch and then release them into the interior of the U.S.
The Biden legal team said having the ability to catch-and-release is critical to its immigration plans, and the federal judge who intervened is trampling on the president’s powers.
“That injunction imposes a severe and unwarranted burden on Executive authority over immigration policy and foreign affairs by ordering the government to precipitously re-implement a discretionary program that the secretary has determined was critically flawed,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote.
Officially known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, the remain in Mexico policy helped solve the last border surge in 2019 by allowing Homeland Security to push tens of thousands of migrants back across the border to wait until their deportation cases were pending in U.S. courts.
Given that many migrants were lodging bogus claims in order to gain a foothold in the U.S., the policy denied them that opportunity.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas revoked the policy in a memo earlier this summer, arguing it interfered with foreign relations with Mexico and saying he had questions about whether it had worked as well as the department believed.
The district court blasted Mr. Mayorkas’s reasoning, saying his duty is to follow the law, and saying he can’t revoke policies simply because he has questions about it.