Judge Stands Behind Immigration Rulings

By Jim Saunders

 ©2024 The News Service of Florida. All rights reserved; see terms.

      TALLAHASSEE — A federal judge this week stood behind his rulings that Florida could challenge Biden administration immigration policies, after an appeals court ordered him to reconsider the issue.

Pensacola-based U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell released a 10-page decision Tuesday that said Florida had legal standing to challenge federal policies related to undocumented immigrants being released from detention after crossing the country’s southwest border.

In two rulings last year, Wetherell sided with Florida and said the policies, known as “Parole Plus Alternatives to Detention” and “Parole with Conditions,” violated federal law. The U.S. Department of Justice appealed to the 11th U.S Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Atlanta-based appeals court on Feb. 13 sent the dispute back to Wetherell, citing a U.S. Supreme Court opinion against Texas and Louisiana in a separate immigration case. The appeals court ordered Wetherell to determine whether he had “jurisdiction” in the Florida case “in light of” the U.S. Supreme Court opinion.

Plaintiffs must show standing before judges have jurisdiction to decide cases. So if Florida didn’t have standing, Wetherell couldn’t have ruled in its favor.

The U.S. Supreme Court decided last year that Texas and Louisiana did not have standing to challenge Biden administration immigration-enforcement policies. But Wetherell’s ruling this week drew distinctions with the Texas case, which he said challenged a U.S. Department of Homeland Security policy about which undocumented immigrants would be arrested and prosecuted.

“The policies at issue in these (Florida) cases do not involve arrest or prosecution, but rather explain how DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) will exercise its statutory ‘parole’ authority … with respect to aliens who are already in DHS custody after arriving at the southwest border,” Wetherell wrote. “Nothing in Texas (the U.S. Supreme Court opinion) held that federal courts cannot adjudicate the validity of non-detention/parole policies like these.”

Wetherell, a former state appeals-court judge appointed to the federal bench by former President Donald Trump, also wrote that “there is nothing extraordinary (or unusual) about the suits filed by Florida challenging DHS’s non-detention/parole policies.”

“The court (Wetherell) was simply asked in these cases to decide whether the challenged policies complied with the clear and unambiguous terms of the statute that restricted DHS’s authority to ‘parole’ aliens into the country who would otherwise be subject to mandatory detention until the completion of their immigration proceedings,” he wrote.

Wetherell’s decision on the standing issue went back to the federal appeals court.

After the Supreme Court ruling in the Texas and Louisiana case, Justice Department attorneys filed a brief arguing the appeals court should reject Florida’s arguments for similar reasons.

“In United States v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that two states lacked standing to challenge DHS’s (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s) immigration enforcement policies because they lacked ‘a legally and judicially cognizable’ injury where their alleged injury were costs associated with having more noncitizens in their states. Florida similarly fails to satisfy the ‘bedrock constitutional requirement’ of standing,” the Justice Department brief said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General Ashley Moody have made a high-profile issue of challenging federal immigration policies as migrants have streamed across the country’s southwest border.

The state filed a lawsuit in September 2021 alleging that the Biden administration violated laws through “catch-and-release” policies. The state has contended that undocumented immigrants move to Florida and create costs for such things as the education, health-care and prison systems.

The lawsuit resulted in Wetherell’s rulings against the federal government in March 2023 and May 2023, before the Supreme Court decided the Texas and Louisiana case.