On Tuesday, all parties at Department of Homeland Security v New York, a lawsuit challenging a Trump-era policy aimed at low-income immigrants has prompted the Supreme Court to dismiss the case. The court quickly granted the request and removed one of the most controversial cases the judges planned to hear this year from the case.
This is the third time in just over a month that a major immigration case has gone up in smoke. In early February, the court requested the removal of two cases – Mayorkas v. Innovation Law Lab and Praying against Sierra Club – from his argument calendar.
The Innovation Law Laboratory The case disputes Trump’s “stay in Mexico” policy, which has forced tens of thousands of migrants seeking asylum in the United States to wait in Mexico while their cases are being processed – the Biden government is withdrawing the policy.
Sierra Club involves a challenge to Trump’s effort to divert billions of dollars allocated to the military to build a wall along the Mexican border. On his first day in office, Biden signed a proclamation stating that ‘no longer is a U.S. taxpayer [shall] diverted to build a boundary wall. ”
The New york the case, meanwhile, has challenged the Trump administration’s “public indictment” rule, which sought to prevent immigrants from entering the United States, extending their visas, or getting a green card if immigration officials determined that a specific immigrant probably public utilities such as e.g. food stamps or Medicaid.
Biden called for a formal review of this policy, and the Supreme Court’s decision to no longer address the case should enable lower court orders blocking the policy in large parts of the country to be enforced. set.
The court’s decision to New york case is not particularly surprising – it would be extraordinary for any court to address a case that dismisses all parties, but it is likely to be a major victory for immigrants. Although several lower courts ruled against the public indictment, the Supreme Court reinstated the ruling in early 2020 and voted 5-4 along party lines. And that was before the late Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement by Judge Amy Coney Barrett moved the court further to the right.
If the court were to make a final decision to uphold the rule for public charges, future presidents could rely on the decision to reinstate the rule, even if the Biden government abandons it.
The Supreme Court dealt with far fewer cases than usual
The anti-climate decisions of the New york, Innovation Law Laboratories, en Sierra Club cases are a reminder that elections have consequences: it is likely that the Supreme Court would have ratified all three policies if Trump were still in office. The court also planned to hear surprisingly few cases during its current term, even before Biden’s government asked him to start removing cases.
Each year, the Supreme Court begins with a new term in October and usually ends in the following June. During the interim months, the court usually holds seven “sessions” – five- or six-day blocks where the judges will usually hear two cases a day. In a regular hearing, the judges will therefore hear 10-12 cases.
This term, however, the court heard far fewer cases than usual. It heard only eight cases during its November session, five in its January session and six in its February session. The judges plan to hear only seven cases during the March session.
There are a number of possible explanations for this extraordinarily slow workload. The pandemic forced the judges to close their building to the public and keep oral arguments at bay, and the pandemic may also have delayed lower courts, meaning there are fewer decisions to appeal to the judges.
The membership of the court has also changed significantly over the past few years – President Trump has appointed three judges during his four-year term – so the judges want to spend some time being comfortable with each other (and learning how their new colleagues probably in important before filling their calendar with new arguments.
And the judges may also feel that they are politically vulnerable, as Congress and the White House are both controlled by Democrats, making them very aware of how the current 6-3 Republican majority of the court came about.
Shortly after Judge Antonin Scalia passed away in February 2016, Senate Republicans refused to hold a confirmation hearing for President Obama’s candidate for the Supreme Court Merrick Garland – they claimed at the time that the Senate should not have new judges during a presidential election year. does not confirm. But when Ginsburg passed away in September 2020, Republicans abandoned this rule. Justice Barrett was confirmed just eight days before the 2020 election.
This has led many Democrats to call for an aggressive response, such as adding additional seats to the Negro court to dilute the votes of Trump’s judges. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to the Supreme Court.
It is therefore also possible that the judges may be low to discourage the Democrats from expanding the court.
This does not mean that this term is a total place to sleep. The judges heard another case that wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a second case that could give religious conservatives a broad new right to discrimination against LGBTQ people, and a third case that left the remnants of the Act on Voting Rights could dominate. The court is likely to rule on these cases in June.
But for whatever reason, it was an extraordinarily quiet term.