Vox: A Trump judge seized control of ICE. Will the Supreme Court stop him?
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Last September, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced new Guidelines for the Enforcement of Civil Immigration Law to focus the Department’s resources in immigration enforcement and to target for removal noncitizens who are a threat to national security and public safety.
The guidelines have been challenged. Last week, Chief Judge Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rejected a challenge to the enforcement priorities in a case (Arizona v. Biden) brought by Arizona, Ohio, and Montana.
The Fifth Circuit reached a contrary conclusion in a case brought by Texas. The Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to stay the Fifth Circuit order blocking the Department of Homeland Security from implementing its immigration enforcement priorities.
Ian Millhiser for Vox reviews the various legal challenges to the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement priorities:
“Are federal law enforcement officers under the command and control of elected officials, or are they free to enforce the law as they choose, targeting the people they want to target, without guidance from an elected leader?
That’s the fundamental question in United States v. Texas, a case that just arrived at the Supreme Court on its `shadow docket.’ It asks whether the Biden administration can instruct federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to follow certain enforcement priorities when deciding which undocumented immigrants to apprehend and remove from the country.”
Millhiser faults the district court injunction entered by Trump appointee Judge Drew Tipton, which the Fifth Circuit affirmed, and lauds the Sixth Circuit ruling:
“Tipton faulted Mayorkas’s memo because it supposedly failed to consider `the costs its decision imposese on the States.’ But a 21-page document accompanying Mayorkas’s memo includes an entire subsection titled `Impact on States.’ That subsection concludes that `none of the asserted negative effects on States — either in the form of costs or the form of undermining reliance interests’ — undercut the benefits of Mayorkas’s preferred policy.
Tipton’s opinion, in other words, takes such extraordinary liberties with the law and with the facts of this case that there is a very real possibility that even this Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative supermajority, will determine that he went too far. It is notable that, shortly after Tipton handed down his decision, a federal appeals court in Ohio rejected Tipton’s arguments and sided with Mayorkas’s power to set enforcement priorities.
That decision was written by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit, a conservative Bush appointee who the late Justice Antonin Scalia described as `one of the very best law clerks I ever had.’”
Check out the article for more detailed analysis.
KJ