1/20/22

By Josh Rubin

Maybe some of you listened to the arguments before the DC court of appeals yesterday, where the Biden administration sought to reverse a lower court finding that the way we are expelling people from our country, without even the due process protections of Title 8, was not legal and should stop.

The name of the expulsion method is Title 42, and it relies on COVID as the reason we bypass our own laws as well as international laws to send people back across the border or load them onto planes to fly them back to their countries of origin without allowing them to make a case for asylum. Thousands upon thousands of people are being expelled under this program, started under Trump, and continued and expanded and streamlined under Biden.

Those who tuned in got to listen to legal arguments from the Biden administration that obscure reality. The reality is that the order applies to less than one percent of the people crossing the border, and there is no basis for believing that population to be more likely infected than the huge numbers we allow across our borders. The only difference is that those we stop are undocumented. So, the reality is that we are using an excuse to break our own laws to handle an immigration issue, not a health issue.

You also might have heard a judge point out that in another court the administration is arguing that returning asylum seekers to Mexico, in a much smaller program called the Migrant Protection Protocols, is too dangerous for the asylum seekers, petitioning the courts to let them end that program. Which, of course begs the question: if it is too dangerous for one program, why not for the other?

I can speculate about the reasons, but for now, let’s return to the border from the halls of the justice system and remember what this means, as lawyers present their cases and judges deliberate. It means that each one of those thousands upon thousands is a man, a woman, a child, and each of those bodies is returned to great danger. Some have died. More will. All in contravention of more than the law.

It is a moral disgrace.