Rebuffing arguments made by Louisiana and Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court last week rejected a challenge to the Biden administration’s immigration guidelines governing which noncitizens it decides to deport.
The high court ruled 8-1 against a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general in Louisiana and Texas. The two states alleged that the administration’s guidelines flew in the face of two federal laws mandating the arrest of noncitizens who complete prison terms.
But on Friday, the Supreme Court concluded that the two states did not have legal standing to advance their complaint – that is, they lacked the ability to bring the litigation based on their alleged injury resulting from the federal policy.
It’s up to the executive branch to decide how aggressively to make arrests of defendants who violate the law, the court said.
“The principle of executive branch enforcement discretion over arrests and prosecutions extends to the immigration context,” the ruling says.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said the ruling was significant for what the court left unsaid.
“We filed this suit because Joe Biden has failed to protect our homeland by ignoring Congress and releasing violent criminal aliens into our communities,” Landry said in a statement emailed to the Louisiana Record. “The Supreme Court specifically did not endorse the Biden administration lawlessly releasing killers and child rapists onto American streets. Rather, the court noted that Congress could not only authorize lawsuits against the executive branch by a specified group of plaintiffs that have suffered harm but also authorize judicial remedies.”
The attorney general encouraged Congress to approve legislation that would allow states to hold federal officials accountable for actions that run contrary to immigration law.
“Louisiana will continue pursuing every legal avenue to defend the rights of Americans injured by Biden’s dangerous immigration policies,” Landry said.
The high court stressed that the states failed to cite a precedent or tradition for a federal court to weigh in on a lawsuit of this kind.
“On the contrary, this court has previously ruled that a plaintiff lacks standing to bring such a suit ‘when he himself is neither prosecuted nor threatened with prosecution,’” the court’s decision states.
But the justices also acknowledged that the decision does not constitute an opinion on whether the Biden administration is “complying with its statutory obligations.”