A judge in the United States has given President Joe Biden’s administration five weeks to end a controversial policy that allowed authorities to deport hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers arriving at the southern border with Mexico. The administration had filed a motion seeking the delay late Tuesday, hours after U.S. District Court Judge Emmett Sullivan said in a 49-page ruling that Title 42 was an “arbitrary and capricious” policy that violated federal regulatory legislation. “This transition period is critical to ensure this [the Department of Homeland Security, DHS] may continue to perform its mission to secure the Nation’s borders and conduct its border operations in an orderly manner,” government lawyers wrote in their motion. In a separate statement, DHS said it needed five weeks to “prepare for a smooth transition” at the border. “The United States will continue to fully enforce our immigration laws at our borders,” the department said. On Wednesday morning, Sullivan said he was granting the administration’s request with “GREAT REluctance.” He added that his order to halt the border deportation policy will take effect at midnight on December 21. Human rights advocates hailed the judge’s ruling on Title 42, which has been widely criticized as a violation of international and US law that puts asylum seekers and refugees at risk. More than 2.4 million Title 42 deportations have taken place at the US-Mexico border since the policy was first implemented under former President Donald Trump in March 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the US government. Many of those expelled were repeat offenders. The Trump administration had argued that Title 42 was necessary to prevent the spread of the virus, but experts said it was a pretext to advance the former Republican president’s hardline, anti-immigration policies. The order allowed US border officials to quickly remove most asylum seekers without giving them a chance to apply for protection. Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney who led the Title 42 challenge, hailed the judge’s decision as “a huge victory and one that literally has life and death at stake.” “We have long said that the use of Title 42 against asylum seekers was inhumane and driven purely by politics. Hopefully this decision will end this horrible policy once and for all,” Gelernt said in a statement on Tuesday. While the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) first issued the Title 42 order, the public health agency said in April that it no longer needed to stop the spread of COVID-19. The Biden administration said at the time that it planned to rescind the policy a month later. But a Louisiana-based federal judge ruled in May that the Biden administration could not do that after 20 US states sued. They argued that due consideration had not been given to a potential increase in border arrivals if Title 42 were repealed. The ban was imposed unevenly in terms of nationality, and largely affects immigrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – in addition to Mexicans – because Mexico allows them to be returned from the US. Last month, the Biden administration extended Title 42 to Venezuelans after Mexico agreed to take them back at the border under Title 42, raising concerns and fears that a new crisis is brewing. In his ruling Tuesday, Sullivan said authorities failed to consider the impact on asylum seekers and possible alternatives. Officials knew that implementing the order would likely result in people being deported to places with a “high likelihood” of “persecution, torture, violent assault or rape,” he wrote. Diana Kearney, senior legal counsel at Oxfam America, said in a statement that the judge’s decision “ends a racist and illegal policy that sacrificed the lives of vulnerable children, women and men on the political altar.” “While nothing can undo the incredible violence that millions of refugees have suffered at the hands of these cruel and misguided politicians, we welcome the renewed opportunity for the United States to offer asylum to refugees and restore respect for the rule of law,” said Kearney. .
