The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled for the Biden administration in an important immigration case, saying Texas and Louisiana lacked the legal standing to challenge the executive branch’s priorities on who should be deported.
At issue is a Biden administration policy that says the Department of Homeland Security should focus on arresting recent border crossers and immigrants who pose a threat to public safety, rather than the millions of other noncitizens who have lived here for years.
The policy was a departure from the Trump administration, which said anyone in the country illegally could be targeted for deportation.
Friday’s decision was 8-1, with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. the lone dissenter.
“The States have brought an extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the majority. “They want a federal court to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policies so as to make more arrests. Federal courts have not traditionally entertained that kind of lawsuit; indeed, the States cite no precedent for a lawsuit like this.”
The Biden administration’s guidelines were challenged by Texas, Louisiana and a number of other Republican-led states, and halted nationwide by a district judge in Texas, who said the guidelines violated federal law. The justices voted 5-4 last summer not to let the guidelines take effect while the Biden administration challenged the lower-court ruling.
In arguing the case, the Biden administration said the lower court ruling was untenable and at odds with past deference to how the executive branch carries out its duties under the Immigration and Nationality Act.
“Across 25 years and five presidential administrations, the agency has never implemented the INA in the manner that [the states] suggest,” Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar said during oral arguments. “Given congressional funding choices, it would be impossible for DHS to do so.”
Kavanaugh’s opinion, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, said the court was taking no position on whether the administration’s policy “is complying with the relevant statutes.” He said Congress or even the voters have the ability to examine “the Executive Branch’s arrest policies.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the outcome of the case, although they had different reasoning.
Alito was alone in saying the states could bring the challenge.
The majority holds “that the only limit on the power of a President to disobey a law like the important provision at issue is Congress’s power to employ the weapons of inter-branch warfare - withholding funds, impeachment and removal, etc.,” Alito wrote. “I would not blaze this unfortunate trail. I would simply apply settled law, which leads ineluctably to the conclusion that Texas has standing.”
The administration stressed the guidelines were just that, giving the nation’s 6,000 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents discretion to decide which unlawful immigrants posed the most pressing threats.
But Texas and other Republican-led states said the guidance violated specific commands from Congress. One provision of federal law says DHS “shall take into custody” noncitizens convicted of certain crimes when they are released from criminal custody. Another says DHS “shall remove” a noncitizen within 90 days after a final deportation order.
Doing so would require between 60,000 and 80,000 more arrests, Texas argued in its court filings. ICE has 34,000 detention beds and more than 4 million undocumented immigrants in its caseload, including 327,000 people with criminal histories.
An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, and some have been here for decades. The Biden administration has urged Congress to pass a law that would one day let those individuals apply for U.S. citizenship. Republicans have opposed that idea, citing record numbers of illegal crossings on the southern border during much of Biden’s term.
The case is United States v. Texas.
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The Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.