Federal Judge Blocks Use of Title 42 by Authorities

A federal judge issued a ruling against the Trump administration’s pandemic-era immigration policy Title 42.  The ruling blocks federal authorities from using the policy to expel illegal aliens.

From the report in Fox News, the judge said this about his ruling:

“U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said the policy is “arbitrary and capricious” and violates the Administrative Procedure Act in his ruling on Tuesday.”

As mentioned in the Fox story, the policy has been used to great effect to expel illegal aliens in the United States under both the Trump and Biden administrations.

“The Trump administration used the authority to expel more than 185,000 migrants in fiscal year 2020, while the Biden administration expelled 937,000 migrants in 2021 and 983,000 migrants in 2022 using Title 42, according to Customs and Border Protection data.” 

We’ve extensively chronicled the saga over Title 42 here on the CAPS blog. Originally, the policy was set to be lifted by the Biden administration but a federal judge in Louisiana blocked that plan in mid-May.

In June, Congress moved to extend the policy for six months. Despite this, Democrats blocked an amendment to the Inflation Reduction Act that would have required the Biden administration to keep the policy in place.

This all comes on the heels of a record breaking border crisis. According to statistics posted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there have already been over 76K Title 42 expulsions in FY 2023 at the southwest border (for context, FY 2023 started on October 1,2022).

This past October was another record breaking month at the border with over 230K encounters, and is the eighth straight month with over 200K encounters.

With the border crisis getting worse, another policy used to help mitigate the situation is now seemingly gone. We don’t know what the future holds, but we can only imagine that with moves like this the border crisis is only going to get worse before it gets better.