Migrants who want to enter the USA via Mexico currently have no chance at all of applying for asylum. A regulation from the Trump era stipulates immediate rejection, which was once justified with the corona pandemic. Although this danger has now been averted, the rule remains in place following a ruling by the Supreme Court.
The US Supreme Court has stopped the abolition of a controversial deportation rule that has been in effect since the peak of the Corona crisis in 2020. By a majority of five to four judges, the US Supreme Court granted a motion by 19 US states that said they would face a flood of migrants if the rule known as Title 42 was repealed.
The court ruled that the rule introduced under former President Donald Trump would remain in effect pending a landmark ruling on a lawsuit against plans by the US administration under President Joe Biden to abolish Title 42. Negotiations on this should start in February.
The regulation introduced in March 2020 stipulates that migrants apprehended at the US-Mexico border must be turned away immediately in order to prevent the further spread of the corona virus. Hundreds of thousands of people have already been deported on the southern border of the USA on the basis of Title 42.
The Supreme Court ruling could now give Biden’s government until May or June before making a final decision. Human rights organizations have long criticized the regulation. They argue that people are being deprived of the right to apply for asylum under a health policy pretext. Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, still stuck to the rule for a long time. In April, the government then announced that it wanted to lift the rule in May. But that was blocked by a federal judge in southern Louisiana after a lawsuit by conservative-governed states, so Title 42 remained in effect.
In November, a federal judge in the capital Washington ruled that the regulation had to be repealed. Title 42 was subsequently scheduled to end on the Wednesday before Christmas. Conservative-governed states appealed this decision to the Supreme Court. On December 19, they had already achieved their first legal success: the Supreme Court initially put the repeal on hold.
In the run-up to the verdict, observers had feared that repealing Title 42 would lead to a further massive increase in the arrival of refugees and migrants who want to get to the USA via Mexico. The number of people apprehended at the border with Mexico has already increased significantly during Biden’s tenure. Refugee and migration policy is a highly charged political issue in the United States. Trump’s Republicans accuse Biden and his Democrats of letting people into the country uncontrolled and thus harming the United States.
