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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday paused the scheduled lifting of an emergency health order the federal government has used for more than two years to quickly turn away migrants, including those seeking asylum, at the southwest border.
The order comes after an Arizona-led coalition of 19 states, which included Texas, asked the Supreme Court on Monday to halt the lifting of the health order known as Title 42, which was set to expire this Wednesday.
The high court gave the Biden administration until 4 p.m. Central time Tuesday to respond to its order.
Last month, Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s use of the order to prevent people from accessing the asylum process is “arbitrary and capricious” and a violation of the law because it was not implemented properly. Sullivan ordered the Biden administration to immediately lift Title 42, then later agreed to give the federal government until Dec. 21 so it could make preparations.
The CDC under the Trump administration invoked Title 42 in March 2020 — at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. — for the first time since its creation in 1944 and said it was a necessary step to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in immigrant detention centers, where many migrants are placed after they arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has since said that immigrants are not driving up the number of COVID-19 cases.
Immigration officials have used the health order more than 2 million times to expel migrants, many of whom have been removed multiple times after making repeated attempts to enter the U.S. Under Title 42, the recidivism rate — the percentage of people apprehended more than once by a Border Patrol agent — has increased from 7% to 27% since fiscal year 2019.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.