The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on December 27 to keep in place the public health code clause that came into effect under the Trump administration in the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, “Title 42”, which further restricts immigration, including asylum searches on the southwest border.

The latest ruling replaces an order issued by Chief of Justice John G. Roberts last week that halted the lifting of the health policy, known as Title 42, which the Biden administration had planned to wind down. “Title 42 will remain in place for at least two more months. In its Tuesday order, the high court agreed to hear arguments in February on whether an Arizona-led coalition of 19 states, including Texas, can challenge a lower-court ruling that ordered the Biden administration to lift Title 42”, according to the Texas Tribune.

That lower court ruling will remain blocked until the Supreme Court rules on a procedural rite of whether the GOP-led states can intervene in a lawsuit originally filed by immigrant lawyers against the federal government.

“The Supreme Court has allowed Title 42 to remain in place temporarily while the case is ongoing, and we continue to challenge this horrific policy that has caused so much harm to asylum seekers and cannot plausibly be justified any longer as a public health measure”, said Lee Gelernt, the lead lawyer in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal challenge to Title 42, according to the Texas Tribune.

“Immigration officials have used the health order more than 2 million times to expel migrants, some of whom have been removed multiple times after making repeated attempts to enter the U.S. The number of repeat migrants, according to Border Patrol agents, has increased from 7% to 27% since fiscal 2019,” according to the same publication. Under Title 42, the recidivism rate — the percentage of people apprehended more than once by a Border Patrol agent — has increased from 7% to 27% since fiscal year 2019”, according to the same publication.

According to recent data, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported that agents withdrew more than 3,400 migrants from El Paso in late December 2022, expelling them from their home countries under Title 42.

“The request from the coalition of states for the Supreme Court to weigh in came after Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled last month that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s use of the order — which removes migrants from the U.S. without allowing them to access the asylum process — is ‘arbitrary and capricious’ and a violation of the law because it was not implemented properly”.

Sullivan ordered the Biden administration to immediately lift Title 42, then later agreed to give the federal government until Dec. 21 to prepare for the change.

“Sullivan’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed in January 2021 by the ACLU and two Texas-based immigrant rights groups that argued Title 42 violated U.S. asylum laws and that the Trump administration used the pandemic as a pretext to invoke Title 42 and use it as an immigration tool”, according to the Tribune.

In May, U.S. District Judge Robert R. Summerhays blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42. The administration appealed, and that case remains pending in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.