Supreme Court Signals Rough Sledding for Biden’s Immigration Agenda

AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File

The Supreme Court‘s ruling this week reviving a Trump-era border policy sent shock waves through the immigration debate, signaling that the justices will present major hurdles for President Biden as he tries to impose his more relaxed approach to immigration enforcement.

Stephen Miller, an architect of President Trump‘s immigration agenda, had been anxiously awaiting the court‘s first encounter with a Biden policy.

“My greatest fear was that we would wake up in a world in which all of the precedents that were built up over the last four years to enjoin President Trump‘s lawful actions would be suddenly forgotten when it came to President Biden‘s illegal actions,” Mr. Miller told The Washington Times. “What the Supreme Court said with its 6-3 ruling is that every single one of Joe Biden‘s actions, particularly in the immigration context, are extremely vulnerable.”

The ruling itself was limited.

The justices declined to issue a stay of a lower court injunction that found the Biden team acted too rashly in erasing the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, violating the Administrative Procedure Act. Remain in Mexico — the policy’s official name is the Migrant Protection Protocols — was used to solve the 2019 border surge, but the Biden team argued that it was too cruel to migrants and had to go.

The court‘s ruling was narrow, but the implications were huge

By refusing to overrule the lower court, the justices signaled that they would give judges significant leeway to settle disputes over the expanding use of executive power in the Biden era, just as they did for Mr. Trump.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s agreement with the ruling was critical.

He was part of several rulings against Mr. Trump, including phasing out DACA and adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Some analysts wondered whether he was evincing anti-Trump sentiment. Analysts said the decision Tuesday signals that the chief justice will apply the same scrutiny to Mr. Biden‘s moves.

“Chief Justice Roberts has placed President Biden in a pair of cement-filled shoes. He can go nowhere but down,” Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law, wrote in a piece Wednesday at Reason.com.

Read the rest from Stephen Dinan HERE

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