US appeals to court against Biden, allowing expulsion of border families to continue

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The migrants, mostly Haitians, boarded a boat bound for Acandi, Colombia to board eventually to Panama and continue north, to Necocli, Colombia September 23, 2021.

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A U.S. court of appeals ruled on Thursday that the Biden administration could proceed with the deportation of migrant families caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border under the mandate of the Covid-19 pandemic while a lawsuit challenging proceeds policy.

The ordinance, known as Title 42, was issued in March 2020 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Donald Trump, citing the need to limit the spread of the coronavirus. A federal judge ruled on Sept. 16 that the policy would not apply to families but President Joe Biden’s administration appealed this ruling.

In his original decision against the Biden administration, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote that the public health law that Title 42 policy was based on did not allow eviction in migrants.

Dismissing asylum seekers denies them the “opportunity to seek humanitarian benefits” that they are entitled to under immigration law, he wrote. The order was set to take effect on Thursday but the Biden administration appealed.

The judge’s order only applies to families and not to single adults.

Migrants were deported from the U.S. and repatriated to Mexico under the heading Title 42 to Mexico on the Paso del Norte International border bridge, in the photo taken from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico on May 18, 2021.

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“We failed in the determination but this is only a preliminary step in the appeal proceedings, and nothing is stopping the Biden administration from immediately ending the appalling policy during this Trump era,” said Lee Gelernt, an attorney for American Civil Liberties Union, in a statement.

Biden, a Democrat, faced pressure from Republicans over the volume of border arrests, which hovered around 20 years high.

A camp of nearly 15,000 Haitians in South Texas who crossed the Rio Grande river from Mexico has drawn attention to the issue in recent days. Using the policy in Title 42, the administration quickly expelled thousands of people – including families with young children – back to Haiti, a country plagued by a political crisis and numerous natural disasters. The U.S. special order in Haiti resigned in protest of the expulsion.

Thecamp has already been cleared of thousands more migrants still in U.S. custody awaiting processing and others have been released to the United States to face U.S. immigration court hearings.

Biden faced growing criticism from some health experts, immigration advocates, and fellow Democrats to stop applying the Title 42 mandate, which essentially stopped access to asylum for hundreds of thousands of migrants.

Biden in February excluded unaccompanied children from the eviction policy and his administration applied it to fewer families arrested on the border in recent months. In August, the Biden administration expelled about 19% of families arrested at the border under Title 42.

The Biden administration said the Title 42 policy remains necessary to limit the spread of the coronavirus, though it did not provide scientific data to support that reasoning.

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