The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth District ruled on Monday to dismiss the Biden administration's bid to end the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" policy that obliged migrants seeking entry to the United States to wait in Mexico.
"The [Department of Homeland Security] claims the power to implement a massive policy reversal — affecting billions of dollars and countless people — simply by typing out a new Word document and posting it on the internet", the ruling said. "No input from Congress, no ordinary rulemaking procedures, and no judicial review. We address and reject each of the government's reviewability arguments and determine that DHS has come nowhere close to shouldering its heavy burden to show that it can make law in a vacuum".
Formally, the policy is known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, and it was one of the first Trump-era laws that the Biden administration focused on immediately after taking over the White House.
However, the states of Texas and Missouri sued the Cabinet over the cancellation of the policy, with the court ordering to reinstate the MPP in August. In compliance with the ruling, the Biden administration started sending the first migrants back to Mexico in early December.
The DHS noted that particularly vulnerable individuals will be excluded from being enrolled in the "Remain in Mexico" programme, and all participants will be offered a coronavirus vaccine.
The decision by the appeals court marked another failure of the Biden administration to ditch the Trump-era migrant policy. With the dramatically surging numbers of migrants on the southern border, Biden's White House faces a massive backlash over how it handles the immigration crisis.
Particularly, it is Vice President Kamala Harris who is dealing with the most criticism, being the so-called "border czar". Recently, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei told Fox News that Harris, despite being responsible for tackling the migrant issue, has not contacted him since summer. White House press secretary Jen Psaki denied the president's claims and confirmed that the vice president is still the White House's border czar.