The Supreme Court’s radical ruling this week on Remain in Mexico, officially known as MPP, exposes the right wing’s construction of a judicial pipeline to force the Biden Administration to adopt Trump policies by fiat. It’s a disturbing development that endangers not just immigration and border policies, but also the broader Biden agenda.
Below are key voices assessing the context and worrisome implications of the MPP ruling.
- Ruth Marcus column in the Washington Post, “So now the Supreme Court is okay with judges setting immigration policy?”: “It’s easy to miss amid the flood of other news, but thanks to the Supreme Court, a big chunk of our national immigration policy is now being run by a federal trial court judge in Texas. Oh, yes, also our foreign relations … The conservative justices like to opine on the limits of the judicial role, the importance of deference to the executive and the particular need to avoid having the judiciary insert itself into foreign affairs. Where, exactly, were those noble sentiments here?”
- David Leopold in Medium, “The Anti-Immigrant Judicial Pipeline Is Gushing And There’s Only One Way to Stop It”: “The American judicial system has become an anti-immigrant judicial pipeline — and it’s on full display, and it’s dangerous. The pipeline flows from Republican Attorneys General to hand-picked United States District Court Judges (usually Trump appointees in Texas), to the conservative Fifth Circuit and finally, to the United States Supreme Court … Unless the White House and Democrats on Capitol Hill institute changes into the federal judiciary, this is our future on immigration and other progressive issues.”
- Ian Millhiser on Vox, “The Supreme Court’s stunning, radical immigration decision, explained”: “The decision upends the balance of power between the elected branches and the judiciary. It gives a right-wing judge extraordinary power to supervise sensitive diplomatic negotiations. And it most likely forces the administration to open negotiations with Mexico, while the Mexican government knows full well that the administration can’t walk away from those negotiations without risking a contempt order. With this order, Republican-appointed judges are claiming the power to direct US foreign policy — and don’t even feel obligated to explain themselves.”
- Hayes Brown on MSNBC.com, “Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy is back to make asylum harder”: “There’s no quick fix for this — it’ll be years, if not decades, before most of Trump’s appointees retire. Right now, though, the courts that Trump shaped are safeguarding his most prized policies. Those were put in place by Miller and other nativists who are fighting the browning of America, a fight that the latest census results show they’re losing.”
- Marshall Fitz of the Emerson Collective: “Mandating the US Government reinstate a program of dubious legality that has direct foreign policy/diplomatic consequences was galling judicial activism by the lower courts. From this SCOTUS, that gives so much deference to executive power, it is absolutely appalling.”
