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The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a bid by GOP attorneys general from 14 states after they attempted to have a Trump-era rule reinstating an immigrant wealth test that rejected green card applicants who were deemed to be at risk of becoming dependent on taxpayer-funded benefits.
Bloomberg News reported that without comment, the justices “left in place a federal appeals court decision that said the states couldn’t intervene after President Joe Biden’s administration dropped the federal government’s defense of the so-called public charge rule.”
“The appeal had limited practical importance because the administration formally replaced the Trump rule with a more lenient standard in December. Texas has sued to challenge that step, saying it conflicts with a federal immigration statute,” the outlet’s report continued.
The nation’s highest court heard oral arguments regarding the case during its last term but eventually dropped it, with justices indicating that there were too many intricacies to reach a decision on the primary issues. When the case was dismissed, Chief Justice John Roberts “gently chided President Joe Biden’s administration for some of its legal maneuvering in the multifaceted fight,” Bloomberg News reported.
Meanwhile, on Sunday, Biden made his first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border since he took office and reversed most of former President Donald Trump’s immigration and border security policies and rules, which critics have said contributed to a historic number of illegal crossings over the past two years.
When Biden arrived in El Paso, he was met by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, who handed him a letter with a list of demands.
“Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late,” the letter began. “Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.
“Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis,” the letter continues. “This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.”
The Texas governor then went on to say that under the Trump administration, the border was much more safe and secure.
“Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings,” the letter said. “Texans are paying an especially high price for your failure, sometimes with their very lives, as local leaders from your own party will tell you if given the chance.”
Abbott claimed that the crisis was the result of Biden violating his constitutional obligation “to defend the States against invasion through faithful execution of federal laws.”
He then advised the president that when he finished “the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso,” he needed to:
- You must comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens “shall” be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse.
- You must stop sandbagging the implementation of the Remain-in-Mexico policy and Title 42 expulsions, and fully enforce those measures as the federal courts have ordered you to do.
- You must aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws.
- You must immediately resume construction of the border wall in the State of Texas, using the billions of dollars Congress has appropriated for that purpose.
- You must designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
In September the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border reached a record high for one fiscal year, Newsmax reported.
“Migrants were stopped 227,547 times in September at the U.S. border with Mexico, the third-highest month of Joe Biden’s presidency. It was up 11.5% from 204,087 times in August and 18.5% from 192,001 times in September 2021,” the report stated.
“In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, migrants were stopped 2.38 million times, up 37% from 1.73 million times the year before,” Newsmax added. “The annual total surpassed 2 million for the first time in August and is more than twice the highest level during Donald Trump’s presidency in 2019.”
