15 GOP states go to court to keep Title 42 border policy 

Fifteen Republican states asked a federal judge on Monday to keep the Trump-era policy that allowed authorities to quickly expel migrants under the pretense of the Covid-19 pandemic after it was blocked by a judge last week. 

According to the GOP states, the lifting of the rule will increase the number of migrants attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, directly harming them.

“Because invalidation of the Title 42 Orders will directly harm the States, they now seek to intervene to offer a defense of the Title 42 policy so that its validity can be resolved on the merits, rather than through strategic surrender,” the states said in their filing Monday.

The states seeking to keep the policy in place include Arizona, Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The 15 states argued that the increased flow of migrants “impose financial burdens on the states involuntarily hosting them” and are thereby “entitled to special solitude in the standing analysis.”

“The States have sovereign and quasi-sovereign interests in controlling their borders, limiting the persons present within those borders, excluding persons carrying communicable diseases, and the enforcement of immigration law,” the filing continued.

Title 42 was put in place by President Donald Trump’s administration in March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting. Under the policy, officials could rapidly expel migrants without letting them seek asylum to prevent the spread of the virus within the U.S. 

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan struck down the policy, claiming that it was “arbitrary and capricious” and it violated federal regulatory law.  

Since then, Sullivan has agreed to a Biden administration request to pause the ruling for five weeks to allow the government to prepare to comply with it.