Supreme Court says states can’t overrule Biden on whom to deport

Texas and Louisiana do not have authority to challenge the Biden administration’s guidelines for when to deport migrants from the country, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday, handing a win to President Biden on immigration policy. 

In an 8-1 decision, the court determined the two states lacked the standing to sue over one of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) earliest directives.

“The States essentially want the Federal Judiciary to order the Executive Branch to alter its arrest policy so as to make more arrests,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority.

“But this Court has long held ‘that a citizen lacks standing to contest the policies of the prosecuting authority when he himself is neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution.’”

The suit from Texas and Louisiana challenged the DHS’s immigration enforcement policies, which includes guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to prioritize certain immigrants for detention and deportation. The policy urges agents to focus on the most serious and violent crimes.

“We applaud the Supreme Court’s ruling. DHS looks forward to reinstituting these Guidelines, which had been effectively applied by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to focus limited resources and enforcement actions on those who pose a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security. The Guidelines enable DHS to most effectively accomplish its law enforcement mission with the authorities and resources provided by Congress Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in response.

The policy, designed to diminish the collateral damage of heavy policing on immigrant communities, was met with ire on the right.

In their lawsuit, Texas and Louisiana claimed the Biden administration policy caused direct harm because of increased costs for social services, including health care and education.

The states also accused the administration of failing to enforce immigration laws Congress had enacted designed to “deal with increasing rates of criminal activity” by immigrants.

But Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberal justices, wrote that granting the states’ demands would have far-reaching consequences beyond immigration law.

“If the Court green-lighted this suit, we could anticipate complaints in future years about alleged Executive Branch under-enforcement of any similarly worded laws—whether they be drug laws, gun laws, obstruction of justice laws, or the like,” wrote Kavanaugh. 

“We decline to start the Federal Judiciary down that uncharted path.”

Lower courts had ruled in favor of Texas and Louisiana, endorsing their claims of undue costs related to the administration’s selective enforcement policy.

In a solo dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito excoriated the majority’s reasoning and sided with the lower courts.

“The District Court’s factual findings, which must be accepted unless clearly erroneous, quantified the cost of criminal supervision of aliens who should have been held in DHS custody and also identified other burdens that Texas had borne and would continue to bear going forward,” wrote Alito.

“These findings sufficed to establish a concrete injury that was specific to Texas.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, in a concurring opinion joined by Justices Amy Coney-Barrett and Clarence Thomas, agreed that the states proved the administration’s immigration policies increased costs to them, but argued that the lower courts’ remedy wouldn’t fix that problem.

“The States proved that the Guidelines increase the number of aliens with criminal convictions and final orders of removal released into the States. They also proved that, as a result, they spend more money on everything from law enforcement to healthcare,” Gorsuch wrote.

He added that the states faced a problem of redressability, meaning a ruling favorable to Texas and Louisiana would not remedy those injuries.

An injunction directing federal officials to detain immigrants according to the states’ interpretation of the statute would stand a better chance, Gorsuch wrote, but lower courts are barred by law from issuing such injunctions.

“Put simply, the remedy that would ordinarily have the best chance of redressing the states’ harms is a forbidden one in this case,” he wrote.

Barrett also wrote a concurring opinion, joined by Gorsuch, in which she agreed the states lacked standing because of redressability, and questioned the majority’s legal reasoning.

Updated at 1:17 p.m.