GOP states seek to defend Covid-19 migrant expulsion policy in case where court struck policy down

By Tierney Sneed, CNN

Several Republican-led states asked a court to let them intervene in a case striking down Title 42 rule, so that the states could defend the Trump-era policy, which has allowed for the expulsion of more than 1 million migrants at the US-Mexico border.

The 15 GOP states filed the request to intervene on Monday night after US District Judge Emmet Sullivan struck down the policy last week. Sullivan has also agreed to a Biden administration request that pauses his ruling for five weeks so that the government can prepare to comply with it.

In their new request to intervene, the Republican-led states pointed to the separate litigation they had brought challenging the Biden administration’s efforts to end the program, which resulted in a court order from a separate court blocking Title 42’s termination.

“Because invalidation of the Title 42 orders will directly harm the states, they now seek to intervene to offer a defense of the Title 42 policy so that its validity can be resolved on the merits, rather than through strategic surrender,” they wrote.

The states seeking to defend the policy are Arizona, Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming. They also asked the court to speed up the schedule for considering their request to intervene, proposing a briefing schedule that would wrap up in early December. They said that schedule would give the states time to seek the emergency intervention of a higher court before Sullivan’s ruling striking down Title 42 goes into effect on December 21.

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