WASHINGTON (CN) — Handing a win to President Joe Biden on immigration, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that the administration could move forward with public safety asylum procedures being challenged by Texas and Louisiana.
“The States essentially want the Federal Judiciary to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policy so as to make more arrests,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the 8-1 majority. “But this Court has long held ‘that a citizen lacks standing to contest the policies of the prosecuting authority when he himself is neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution.’”
Kavanaugh said the lawsuit brought by Texas and Louisiana was extraordinarily unusual, concluding that the states were not injured by Biden’s deportation policies and therefore did not have standing to bring the challenge.
“The States lack Article III standing because this Court’s precedents and the ‘historical experience’ preclude the States’ ‘attempt to litigate this dispute at this time and in this form,’” Kavanaugh wrote.
Justice Samuel Alito disagreed with the rest of the bench, finding that the court’s precedent’s support allowing Texas to bring a challenge to Biden’s policies.
“The Court holds Texas lacks standing to challenge a federal policy that inflicts substantial harm on the State and its residents by releasing illegal aliens with criminal convictions for serious crimes,” the Bush appointee wrote.
Texas and Louisiana brought the suit in 2021, before the ink was even dry on a policy that Biden unveiled to make asylum procedures more accessible.
The Department of Homeland Security reports that there are over 11 million noncitizens in the country — more than the government has the manpower to apprehend and remove. With a problem he does not have the resources to solve, Biden gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers guidance to prioritize certain noncitizens for apprehension and removal. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas instructed ICE agents to prioritize enforcement efforts against noncitizens who pose a danger to national security, threaten public safety or pose a threat to border security. There are guidelines by which ICE agents can determine if a noncitizen posed a threat, but Mayorkas also gave the officers discretion.
The Biden administration argues its policy is necessary to deal with a beleaguered immigration system. Texas and Louisiana claim meanwhile that the new guidance violates congressional directives since the Immigration and Nationality Act requires the government to detain certain criminal noncitizens for a specific time and duration.
A Trump-appointed judge blocked Homeland Security from enforcing its new guidelines and later threw out the memorandum, finding that ICE officers do not have the discretion to go beyond agency enforcement policies. The Fifth Circuit declined to block the ruling, sending the case to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.
Ultimately the justices agreed to hear the case. At oral arguments in November, the government urged the court to allow Biden to enforce his immigration policies. U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said the states were asking for something the government could not give them, referring to the apprehension and detainment of every single noncitizen. Prelogar also said the justices should write a ruling that limited the court’s role in settling policy debates.
Although the district court found the states could face monetary costs from the government not arresting more citizens, Kavanaugh stressed alleged injuries must be “legally and judicially cognizable.”
“That ‘requires, among other things,’ that the ‘dispute is traditionally thought to be capable of resolution through the judicial process’ — in other words, that the asserted injury is traditionally redressable in federal court,” the Trump appointee wrote.
Kavanaugh said the states did not provide any evidence through precedent, history or tradition of courts forcing the president to change deportation policies to make more arrests.
“In short, this Court’s precedents and longstanding historical practice establish that the States’ suit here is not the kind redressable by a federal court,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Kavanagh said upholding standing doctrine is important for maintaining the separation of powers by preventing the courts from overstepping their bounds.
“Standing doctrine helps safeguard the Judiciary’s proper — and properly limited — role in our constitutional system,” Kavanagh wrote. “By ensuring that a plaintiff has standing to sue, federal courts ‘prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.’”
Alito argued meanwhile that, rather than upholding the separation of powers, the majority had inflated executive power.
“This sweeping Executive Power endorsed by today’s decision may at first be warmly received by champions of a strong Presidential power, but if Presidents can expand their powers as far as they can manage in a test of strength with Congress, presumably Congress can cut executive power as much as it can manage by wielding the formidable weapons at its disposal,” Alito wrote. “That is not what the Constitution envisions.”
Alito says the court’s decision toes the line of adopting the government’s view that the Constitution does not allow any party to challenge the president’s decisions.
“But the Court provides no principled explanation for drawing the line at this point, and that raises the concern that the Court’s only reason for framing its rule as it does is that no more is needed to dispose of this case,” Alito wrote. “In future cases, Presidential power may be extended even further. That disturbing possibility is bolstered by the Court’s refusal to reject the Government’s broader argument.”
Kavanaugh emphasized, however, that the states’ lack of standing does not prevent a future suit from being brought against the administration’s authority.
“In holding that Texas and Louisiana lack standing, we do not suggest that federal courts may never entertain cases involving the Executive Branch’s alleged failure to make more arrests or bring more prosecutions,” he wrote.
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment on the ruling, nor did the solicitor general of Texas.
Follow @KelseyReichmann
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