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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
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Ninth Circuit Upholds Block of Trump’s Immigration Health Care Rule

A Ninth Circuit panel upheld Friday an earlier ruling that blocked the Trump administration from denying entry to immigrants without health insurance, pending an ongoing lawsuit challenging the new rule.

(CN) - A Ninth Circuit panel upheld Friday an earlier ruling that blocked the Trump administration from denying entry to immigrants without health insurance, pending an ongoing lawsuit challenging the new rule.

In a 2-1 decision, Chief Judge Sidney Thomas, a Clinton appointee, wrote in the 3-page ruling that the status quo "would be disrupted" by granting the government's request to lift the temporary nationwide injunction preventing enforcement of the proclamation made by President Donald Trump on Oct. 4.

"The Proclamation has not yet gone into effect," Thomas wrote. "The changes it would make to American immigration policy are major and unprecedented; the harms the government alleges it will suffer pending review of the motion for stay pending appeal are long-term rather than immediate."

Circuit Judge Daniel Bress, a recent Trump appointee, took a more Federalist stance in his lengthier 14-page dissent that said "the district court's decision is clearly wrong," referring to the ruling made by U.S. District Judge Michael Simon in November.

Simon issued the injunction, saying the proclamation was inconsistent with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that sought to prevent separation of immigrant families.

"In the supposed name of the separation of powers, the district court struck down part of a longstanding congressional statute, invalidated a presidential proclamation, and purported to grant worldwide relief to persons not before the court," Bress wrote in Friday's dissent.

Bress, a member of the Federalist Society that calls for a more originalist interpretation of the Constitution, called the injunction "extraordinary" and "inserts the courts into the President's well-established constitutional and statutory prerogative to place limits on persons entering this country."

Bress wrote that the government will "suffer immediate irreparable harm" in denying a stay of the injunction, saying that the district court order "blocks the President from carrying out responsibilities that Congress entrusted to him."

"I do not think that a district court order that unduly constrains the powers of the people's elected representatives without basis in law should govern for any longer than it already has," he wrote in his fiery dissent.

Categories / Appeals, Civil Rights, Courts, Government, Law, National, Politics

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