Title 42 Upheld by the US Supreme Court

The Supreme Court voted Tuesday to uphold Title 42, the Trump-era immigration policy implemented at the beginning of the pandemic, to quickly expel asylum seekers.

The court voted 5-4 to approve an emergency request by 19 Republican state attorneys general who defended the policy after U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the government could no longer use the COVID-era policy, which allowed authorities to limit asylum-seekers from crossing the border.

Sullivan said the rule violated the Administrative Procedures Act and argued it's "arbitrary and capricious." His ruling stemmed from a lawsuit by a group of asylum-seeking families who fled to the US.

The temporary court order said that while the administration cannot set aside the Title 42 policy, the decision "does not prevent the federal government from taking any action with respect to that policy."

The policy has been used nearly 2 million times to turn migrants away, according to US Customs and Border Protection.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, a conservative, joined the three liberals on the court to vote against the request for a stay. In a dissenting opinion, Gorsuch suggested that the court's decision to intervene seemed more related to the crisis at the border than the legal issues in the case, which concerns whether the states can intervene in defense of a pandemic-era policy. He noted that the states "do not seriously dispute that the public-health justification undergirding the Title 42 orders has lapsed."

Gorsuch said the states may have valid concerns, but he added that "the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis."

"And courts should not perpetuate administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not a policymaker of last resort," he wrote.

The Supreme Court also agreed to hear oral arguments in February and rule on whether the states can intervene in the border crisis. However, Title 42 will remain in place until that ruling is issued until a decision is due by the end of June.