A US border official and migrants from Cuba at the border fence in Yuma, Arizona.
(dpa) The US Supreme Court has put another damper on President Joe Biden and has now put the brakes on his migration policy. The Supreme Court on Thursday (local time) upheld the stay of a measure by the Biden administration that gave US immigration officials more discretion over deportations. The directive had been the subject of court disputes in various states. The Department of Homeland Security announced in September that ICE should focus on deporting migrants who threaten national security. The agency is responsible for arresting illegal immigrants.
The decision of the Supreme Court was extremely narrow with five votes to four. The conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the three liberal judges against putting the measure on hold. The case is now due to be heard in Washington court in December. It was only at the end of June that the Supreme Court strengthened Biden’s migration policy and ruled that he had duly ended a controversial migration regulation from the tenure of his predecessor Donald Trump. In terms of climate policy and abortion law, however, the highest court in the United States recently dealt Biden two sensitive defeats.