A legal group founded by former President Donald Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller and the state of Texas sued the Biden administration in response to its taking in tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children at the border and releasing them into the United States.
Miller’s Washington-based America First Legal Foundation is supporting Texas as outside legal counsel in a lawsuit that charges President Joe Biden did not adequately plan what to do with children arriving at the border in place of turning them away. The suit also asserts that the Biden administration, by releasing those children into the U.S., has put people at greater risk of contracting the coronavirus.
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“By releasing unvaccinated and potentially coronavirus-infected aliens en masse into the country – aliens who have been smuggled and housed in extremely unsanitary conditions – the Biden administration is sabotaging the public health of Texans and all Americans,” Miller said in a statement.
The lawsuit was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in Fort Worth. Trump’s appointee Mark Pittman, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, will preside over the case.
“President Biden’s outright disregard of the public health crisis in Texas by welcoming and encouraging mass gatherings of illegal aliens is hypocritical and dangerous,” Paxton said in a statement. “This reckless policy change stifles the reopening of the Texas economy at a time when businesses need it the most and when our children need to get back to in-person learning as soon as possible.”
At the start of the coronavirus-related closures in March 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an emergency regulation that allowed the government to “prohibit” the “introduction” into the country of anyone it dubbed a “serious danger of the introduction of a disease.” The move, known as Title 42, meant the Border Patrol could not take into custody anyone who unlawfully came across the border from Canada and Mexico, even children and asylum-seekers. Adults, families, and children were immediately expelled to Mexico or held in hotels and then flown home to their countries of origin.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued in 2020, and U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan for the District of Columbia sided with the organization to block border authorities from turning away children. The Trump administration appealed to a federal appeals court, and on Jan. 29, the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled that the Department of Homeland Security could immediately restart expelling children. Biden took office Jan. 20 and was forced to decide on how to proceed. The administration opted not to continue sending back children to Central America and instead took them into federal custody at Border Patrol stations.
More children are showing up each month since Biden stopped turning away children, from 5,700 in January to 18,890 in March. Central American families may have seen the move as an opening to send their children to the U.S. southern border, knowing that they would not be turned away. U.S. officials expect 117,000 unaccompanied children to cross between the ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border by year’s end. The number is higher than the 68,000 taken into custody during the 2014 surge of solo children and the 80,000 who arrived during the 2019 humanitarian crisis at the border.
As a result, children must be held in federal custody, a move that Trump had tried to avoid with the Title 42 measure. Children encountered on the border are brought to Border Patrol facilities, where they are booked into the system and then wait for space to open up at an HHS facility nationwide. HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement is legally responsible for caring for and placing the child with an adult sponsor in the U.S. while their immigration claims proceed in court. In March, the CDC walked back a capacity order and allowed government facilities with children to be filled at 100% capacity. More than a dozen emergency facilities have been opened across the country to hold the steadily rising number of children who continue to come across the southern border.
The CDC had maintained that Title 42 should remain in place until the “danger of further introduction of COVID-19 into the United States has ceased to be a serious danger to the public health, and continuation of the Order is no longer necessary to protect the public health.” The lawsuit claims that the conditions at present mandate the order should still be in effect, even though in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ended the statewide mask mandate and allowed businesses to open at full capacity in early March.
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Paxton also sued the Biden administration for suspending Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which forced migrants seeking asylum to wait for months in Mexico instead of the U.S. while waiting for their claims to be decided.
