The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow the United States to continue to enforce a policy that would send illegal immigrants to Mexico while they wait for a court to process their claims.
After the rule was announced, several organizations and individuals sued the Trump administration to halt enforcement of the policy, arguing that the MPP was inconsistent with the INA.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in his filing on Friday that “relief from this court is ... urgently needed,” asking the top court to grant a stay to stop the injunction in its entirety. He also argued that, at a minimum, the injunction should be stayed to the extent that it applies beyond the named plaintiffs and the specified asylum seekers in the case.
Francisco said a stay is warranted because the district court injunction and the 9th circuit’s decision to uphold it “nullify an essential effort by the government to address the unprecedented number of migrants arriving at our Southwest border and seeking protection against removal, often without a legal basis.”
“[T]he decision below interferes with the U.S. government’s ongoing diplomatic engagement with the government of Mexico to address the crisis at the Southwest border, and it drastically curtails the government’s ability to use the contiguous-territory-return authority that Congress expressly provided in the INA,” he added.
The injunction is guaranteed to cause “irreparable harm” as it would prompt a “rush on the border and potentially requiring the government to allow into the United States and detain thousands of aliens who lack any entitlement to enter this country, or else to release them into the interior where many will simply disappear,” Francisco argued.
He said that immediately after the 9th Circuit Feb. 28 decision, hundreds of asylum seekers presented themselves at the border seeking to enter the United States. He said that if the 9th Circuit’s March 4 decision is allowed to take effect, immigrants waiting in Mexico will “simply travel to ports of entry and seek admission (or cross the border illegally) in Arizona or California.”
The MPP, which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is an “unprecedented” move aimed at addressing the “humanitarian and security crisis at the southern border,” former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said in January last year, when the policy first went into effect.
During a press conference on March 5, Acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan said the MPP is based and rooted in current immigration law and that it makes the immigration process more efficient in stemming the flow of illegal immigration.
“[The MPP] allows us to be more effectively administer our immigration laws, including assisting with legitimate asylum seekers, while also simultaneously ensuring aliens with nonmeritorious or even fraudulent claims no longer have the incentive to make their journey,” Morgan said.
Morgan said rulings like the one made in the 9th Circuit “threatens” the administration’s progress and “only serves to incentivize the smugglers to go right back to exploiting the same migrants that we took out of their hands.” He warned that the ruling could drive another surge of illegal immigration at the southern border, while overwhelming resources of border patrol agents.
“It’s just gonna re-energize the pull factors of illegal immigration putting everyone once again at risk. And the only winners, be clear on this, the only winners on this are going to be the [transnational criminal organizations] and smuggling organizations as they continue to get more money and more power put in their bank accounts on the backs of these migrants,” he said.