Supreme Court keeps immigration limits in place indefinitely

The Supreme Court's decision to keep limits on immigration in place indefinitely is bad news for immigration advocates.

The Supreme Court stayed last week's decision by Chief Justice John Roberts. The case will be argued in February and the stay will remain until the justices make a decision.

President Donald Trump put in place the limits at the beginning of the epidemic. Under the restrictions, the United States has expelled 2.5 million asylum-seekers inside the country and turned away most of them at the border.

Immigration advocates sued to end the policy, saying it goes against American and international obligations. As coronaviruses treatments improve, they argue that the policy is obsolete.

Thousands of migrants have gathered on the Mexican side of the border, filling shelters and worrying advocates who are trying to figure out how to care for them.

Lee Gelernt, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said that they would continue to fight to end Title 42.

The Supreme Court will review the issue of whether the states have the right to intervene in a legal fight. The federal government and immigration advocates argue that the states don't have enough standing to intervene because they waited too long.

The emergency on which those orders were premised has long since expired, even if the court found that the states had the right to intervene.

The judges said the border crisis is not a crisis of faith.

Because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency, courts should not be in the business of issuing administrative edicts. The justices wrote that they are a court of law.

The judge gave advocates a deadline to end the policy. Conservative-leaning states appealed to the Supreme Court, warning that an increase in migration would cause an "unprecedented calamity" and that the federal government had no plan for it.

Roberts, who handles emergency matters that come from federal courts in the nation's capital, issued a stay to give the court time to consider both sides' arguments

The federal government told the Supreme Court that ending the restrictions abruptly would likely lead to disruptions and an increase in illegal border crossing.

The precise issue before the court is a procedural question of whether the states should be allowed to intervene in the lawsuit. A group of states won a lower court order to prevent the end of the restrictions after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in April that it was ending the policy.

The states did not want to participate in the case until the judge ordered them to do so. The administration has abandoned its defense of the Title 42 policy, and they should be able to step in. The administration didn't try to keep Title 42 in place while the legal case played out.

That's right.

Spagat was from San DIEGO.