U.S. Supreme Court puts politics over law with Title 42 ruling to reject asylum seekers – New York Daily News

The Supreme Court has dealt another blow to justice in issuing a full-court stay of the lower court decision to end the disastrous Title 42 policy at the border. In an opinion issued Tuesday, the court said it will decide next year whether a coalition of states hoping to keep the restriction in place indefinitely can intervene in the case.

[ Supreme Court extends pandemic-era border policy Title 42 to reject asylum seekers ]

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor opposed the move, with a separate dissent penned by Neil Gorsuch and seconded by Ketanji Jackson, whose unusual pairing illustrates the extent to which the common sense position here is so obvious as to supersede any ideological hangups. The dissenters note that “even if at the end of it all we find that the States are permitted to intervene, and even if the States manage on remand to demonstrate that the Title 42 orders were lawfully adopted, the emergency on which those orders were premised has long since lapsed.”

That’s the key question in this debacle: is the Title 42 order required to safeguard public health? Even when the order was first issued in March 2020, as the scope of COVID’s devastating power was coming into focus, the answer was no. Now, in a world of vaccines and bivalent boosters, with widespread testing to screen arrivals and still no evidence that migrants were ever a significant vector for the virus, it is a resounding and obvious no.

Instead, the states want to make this about whether they’ve come to rely on the order, not whether it’s needed. Even there they fail to make a case. Asylum seekers were processed normally right up until Title 42 was issued and the states did not collapse. Hazy warnings about increased public spending are a poor reason to keep in place a policy that, even if it was legal, has no current basis for existing.

Those who will actually be harmed are the people simply hoping to ask for humanitarian protections. As the new year begins, the high court has made it that much darker for them.