The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in favor of the Biden administration ending the Trump-era Remain in Mexico policy is “unfortunate” but “not the end,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) said Thursday.
“Today’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court is an unfortunate one, and I believe it was wrongly decided. Over a year ago, Texas and Missouri sued the Biden Administration for illegally abandoning MPP,” Paxton said in a statement.
“I won in district court and then won again on appeal. The Administration dragged its feet and refused to implement this effective program in good faith, allowing hundreds of thousands of illegals to pour over the border month after month,” he continued.
“Today’s decision makes the border crisis worse. But it’s not the end,” he promised. “I’ll keep pressing forward and focus on securing the border and keeping our communities safe in the dozen other immigration suits I’m litigating in court.”
Biden ended the program in January 2021, spurring a flurry of legal challenges, ultimately bringing the case to the Supreme Court. The Trump-era policy specifically required migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. “to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court hearings,” as Breitbart News detailed. But on Thursday, the Court’s Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan ruled in favor of the Biden administration:
President Joe Biden suspended the program on his first day in office in January 2021. But lower courts ordered it reinstated in response to a lawsuit from Republican-led Texas and Missouri. The current administration has sent far fewer people back to Mexico than did the Trump administration.
The heart of the legal fight was about whether immigration authorities, with far less detention capacity than needed, had to send people to Mexico or whether they had the discretion under federal law to release asylum-seekers into the United States while they awaited their hearings.
“It’s going to sunset again soon and they’re not going to reconstitute it and once that happens, I think we’re going to see a chaos at the border we haven’t seen yet. We think we’ve seen some bad things. There’s estimates as many as 1.7 million people are waiting for the Remain in Mexico policy to sunset,” he warned during the 2022 U.S. House Republican Issues Conference.
“That’s the intel we’re getting,” he added. “So it’s going to be a real problem going forward.”
A Rasmussen Reports survey released Thursday found most voters deeming President Biden’s handling of the immigration crisis as either “fair” or “poor,” and most say it will be an important issue heading into the midterms.
The case is Biden v. Texas, No. 21–954 in the Supreme Court of the United States.