


The Biden administration is arguing a recent 8-1 Supreme Court decision should be grounds to quash Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's legal challenge to federal immigration policies.
The Justice Department this week filed a brief that highlighted the Supreme Court's June 23 decision that threw out a challenge by Texas and Louisiana to federal immigration policies. The high court said that the states lacked legal standing, which is an essential test that must be passed in lawsuits.
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In their July 5 brief, the DOJ argued the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit should also find that Florida lacks the standing to challenge policies that DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody (R) say have led to migrants incorrectly being released from detention.
“In United States v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that two states lacked standing to challenge [the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s] immigration enforcement policies because they lacked ‘a legally and judicially cognizable’ injury where their alleged injury were costs associated with having more noncitizens in their states. Florida similarly fails to satisfy the ‘bedrock constitutional requirement’ of standing,” according to page 14 of the brief.
Moody previously sought to contrast Florida's bid with the Biden v. Texas case. She said that the Supreme Court case related to policies for arresting and commencing removal proceedings against migrants who crossed the U.S. border, while Florida's dispute surrounds policies that release people into the country.
“Because the parole policies are not enforcement policies — because they both concern only detention and grant affirmative legal benefits — Florida has a judicially cognizable interest in remedying the sovereign and financial injuries they cause,” Moody's office wrote in a June 26 brief.
The Biden administration appealed to the 11th Circuit in May to challenge two similar rulings by U.S. District Judge Kent Wetherell, an appointee of former President Donald Trump. The rulings, one from March and another in May, held that immigration policies known as “Parole Plus Alternatives to Detention” and “Parole with Conditions” went against federal law.
Wetherell vacated the Parole Plus Alternatives to Detention policy and issued a preliminary injunction against the Parole with Conditions policy just hours before Title 42, the pandemic-era policy that allowed for the rapid deportation of immigrants without an asylum hearing, expired.
Given the Supreme Court's 8-1 decision on June 23, the recent opinion adds a new dimension to Biden's immigration policy defense.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, wrote that the Supreme Court's "precedents and longstanding historical practice establish that the states’ suit here is not the kind redressable by a federal court.”
“The states’ novel standing argument, if accepted, would entail expansive judicial direction of the department’s arrest policies,” Kavanaugh wrote in an opinion joined by Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts along with Democratic-appointed Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“If the (Supreme) Court green-lighted this suit, we could anticipate complaints in future years about alleged executive branch under-enforcement of any similarly worded laws — whether they be drug laws, gun laws, obstruction of justice laws, or the like. We decline to start the federal judiciary down that uncharted path," Kavanaugh added.
Other Republican-appointed justices, including Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Clarence Thomas, concurred for separate reasons, saying that Texas and Louisiana did not have standing because there was no ability to make up or correct any injury to the states.
Justice Samuel Alito issued a blistering dissent opposing the majority, saying the states had met the grounds for standing and beginning his 19-page opposition by stating there were "more than 1.7 million encounters with aliens along the Mexican border" in the fiscal year 2021.
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"DHS does not have the capacity to detain all inadmissible aliens encountered at the border, and no one suggests that DHS must do the impossible," Alito wrote, adding that "DHS has concluded that it may forgo that option altogether and instead simply release into this country untold numbers of aliens who are very likely to be removed if they show up for their removal hearings."
"This practice violates the clear terms of the law, but the Court looks the other way," Alito added.