Over a dozen Republican-led states have come together to sue the Biden administration over the southern border crisis.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, along with other GOP-led states, is taking legal action against President Joe Biden’s decision to overturn “Title 42,” a controversial border policy implemented by former President Donald Trump back in March 2020 that allowed the border agency to turn migrants away.
Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has reported that nearly 2.4 million migrants were detained at the border for the fiscal year ending in September, surpassing the already-historic number of 1.7 million migrant detainees in 2021. The numbers are likely to increase now that “Title 42” has been lifted.
“The rebuttable presumption created by the Circumvention Rule is lawful. However, the exemptions to that rebuttable presumption are not. Nor are the unreasonably vague factors allowing aliens to rebut the presumption,” the lawsuit read.
“The Circumvention Rule contains a severance provision stating ‘that any provision of this section held to be invalid or unenforceable by its terms, or as applied to any person or circumstance, should be construed so as to continue to give the maximum effect to the provision permitted by law.’ This Court should therefore declare the exceptions to the Circumvention Rule to be unlawful, vacate those exceptions, and enjoin Defendants from implementing them,” it continued.
Among the states joining in the lawsuit include Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Wyoming.
“This plan proposed by the Biden Administration does little to deter illegal immigration and, instead, provides the Cartels with a makeshift manual on how to circumvent and exploit our immigration regulations,” Miyares said.
“Encouraging more border crossings without congressional approval will merely worsen the chaos and tragedy taking place at the border and promote further fentanyl and human trafficking that is tearing apart Virginia’s communities,” the attorney general added.
Border enforcement has since been relying on “Title 8” now that “Title 42” is no more. The former deports an illegal border crosser once and prosecutes them if they are stopped again.
