AFPI joins battle to keep Title 42 immigration rule in place

The America First Policy Institute announced on Thursday that it had filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting 24 states in their legal battle to keep a COVID immigration rule in place.

A federal judge in Louisiana blocked the Biden administration from lifting Title 42 in late May. The rule allows border enforcement agents to deport apprehended migrants if they come from an area with a communicable disease and they believe there is serious danger of that disease being brought in to the U.S. Roughly two million migrants have been deported under this rule since April 2020.

In the brief, AFPI follows similar reasoning to the plaintiff states, arguing that the administration's termination of Title 42 violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which requires the government to give notice of a proposed policy change and "give interested persons an opportunity to participate in the rule making through submission of written data, views, or arguments with or without opportunity for oral presentation."

The brief goes on to assert that exceptions to this required process are narrow and that Title 42's termination would not qualify for one. AFPI then outlines the case for continuing Title 42 enforcement in light of the growing migration crisis at the southern border.

"Without policies in place to ensure law enforcement has the infrastructure to sustain open borders, lifting Title 42 will almost guarantee the failure of Border Patrol's other homeland security missions," it reads.

Former acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, also AFPI's executive director, said "[l]ifting Title 42 will exacerbate the current border crisis and fuel a new public health emergency related to fentanyl and human trafficking."

"Fentanyl pills that look like candy are now streaming across the border and into American neighborhoods. As this brief states, Title 42 immediately worked," he continued. "We urge the Court not to allow the Biden Administration to throw open the border even more and place our children and communities at risk until they have a plan in place to stop the flow of immigrants and drugs being trafficked into the United States."