SCOTUS Temporarily Blocks Order To End Title 42 At The Border

The U.S. Supreme Court is temporarily blocking a lower court order to end the use of Title 42, a pandemic-era health measure that has allowed both the Trump and Biden administrations to quickly expel asylum seekers without due process.

The order Monday by Chief Justice John Roberts — who handles emergency matters that come from federal courts in the nation’s capital — comes as Oklahoma and 18 other Republican-led states appealed the decision to lift the federal government’s Title 42 authority at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, arguing it would fuel an "enormous disaster" along the U.S.-Mexico border, where federal officials intercepted migrants more than 2.3 million times in fiscal year 2022, a record high.

Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), a frequent and harsh critic of the Biden administration’s border policies, said even with the Supreme Court’s action, it’s inevitable that the use of Title 42 will end and the administration needs to be prepared.

“Clearly, they are not organized,” Lankford saod in an interview Tuesday. “We’re seeing this massive flood of people still coming to the border and right now the administration‘s asking for additional dollars to process people in faster but not to stop people from coming across the border.”

The Department of Homeland Security estimated the number of migrant encounters along the southern border could spike to between 9,000 and 14,000 each day, once Title 42 is lifted.

Lankford said it's hard to wrap one's head around just how big the problem has become. 

He remembers in 2014, the Obama administration considered it a major crisis that half a million people had crossed the border illegally over the course of the year. 

"We’ve had half a million people in the last two months of this administration," Lankford exclaimed.

The administration is reportedly considering broadening a policy it applied earlier this fall to migrants from Venezuela, requiring that, before they could request asylum in America, they had to first request asylum in one of the countries on the route to the U.S.

"That is a reasonable thing to be able to do," Lankford said, "and we'll see if they actually do it."

In the meantime, the administration has asked Congress for $3.5 billion to streamline the asylum process, hire more border patrol agents, and improve surveillance along the border. 

They remind critics in Congress that they are the ones with the power to change the system.

"The immigration system -- our laws have not been reformed for more than 40 years," Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas said earlier this month. "The problem from administration to administration, regardless of party, is the fact that we are fundamentally working within a broken immigration system."

Senator Lankford doesn't disagree and said reform is needed. Unfortunately, he said, members don't take the problem seriously enough. As an example, he points to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) who has spoken out about the need for immigration reform and sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over immigration policy.

"He now chairs that committee and did not do a single hearing on immigration in two years," Lankford said. "This has just not been a serious effort from Congress to resolve it -- it’s press releases, it’s public statements, but not a serious effort to actually resolve it."