APP/AFP
Washington: A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the US government could not use so-called Title 42 Covid-19 controls to block the entry of asylum-seeking migrants.
Judge Emmet Sullivan said Title 42, which has been used to expel hundreds of thousands of border crossers since March 2020, was an “arbitrary and capricious” policy that violated government procedures.
The ruling leaves the government with few tools to block the entry of migrants at the southern border with Mexico, most of whom ask for asylum.
More than 200,000 have been interdicted each month this year, with many if not most being rebuffed by the rule.
Sullivan also ordered that the government could not seek a stay on his ruling to block its implementation, meaning authorities will have to appeal it to a higher court if they want it to stay in place.The ruling was on a lawsuit brought in January by the American Civil Liberties Union, which accuse the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol of “summary expulsion” of vulnerable families seeking asylum who showed no signs of Covid infection.
“This is a huge victory and one that literally has life-and-death stakes,” said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who led the lawsuit.
“We have said all along that using Title 42 against asylum seekers was inhumane and driven purely by politics. Hopefully this ruling will end this horrific policy once and for all,” he said in a statement.
The ruling came six months after a Louisiana judge ruled in a separate suit that the administration of President Joe Biden, which inherited the Title 42 policy from his predecessor Donald Trump, could not drop the policy. The judge in that case said ending the use of the Title 42 rule would violate official government procedures.
