WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s ruling from the Supreme Court in Biden v. Texas—in which the Constitutional Accountability Center filed a brief on behalf of a bipartisan group of former Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Naturalization Service officials in support of the Biden Administration—CAC President Elizabeth Wydra issued the following reaction:

This ruling is an important victory for people in immigration proceedings at our southwest border—many of them families and asylum seekers seeking refuge in the United States—and the authority of the president to regulate immigration policy in accordance with the text and history of our nation’s immigration laws.

The Court today was right to recognize that the Biden administration had the authority to rescind the Trump-era MPP policy. As the Court explained, the result it reached today is required by the text of the relevant immigration law and confirmed by the historical context in which it was passed.

Moreover, echoing our brief on behalf of a bipartisan group of former DHS and INS officials, the Court noted that for over two decades “every Presidential administration has interpreted section 1225(b)(2)(C) as purely discretionary.”  Indeed, even though “congressional funding has consistently fallen well short of the amount needed to detain all land-arriving inadmissible aliens at the border, . . . no administration has ever used section 1225(b)(2)(C) to return all such aliens that it could not otherwise detain.”

In reaching this result today, the Court also respected the significant enforcement discretion that Congress has long conferred on the executive branch in the realm of immigration policy. That discretion is critical to the ability of the president to competently manage our nation’s foreign affairs.

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Resources:

CAC’s case page in Biden v. Texas: https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/biden-v-texas/

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Constitutional Accountability Center is a think tank and public interest law firm dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of the Constitution’s text and history. Visit CAC’s website at www.theusconstitution.org.

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