Judge allows temporary use of US health rules to block migrant entry

A US judge granted a delay Wednesday on his order to end the use of public health rules to block the entry of asylum-seeking migrants, buying the Biden administration time against a feared rush of border crossers.

Judge Emmet Sullivan said the government could continue the application at the southern border of Title 42, used since 2020 to push back hundreds of thousands of people seeking to enter the United States, for five more weeks.

On Tuesday, Sullivan rocked the government by ruling that Title 42 -- implemented during the pandemic as an anti-Covid measure -- had been invoked against migrants in an "arbitrary and capricious" manner, and could no longer be applied.

In his original ruling, the judge said he would not accept requests for a stay, or temporary delay, which meant border officials would have been forced to immediately begin admitting many of the thousands who cross the border daily seeking asylum status.

Sullivan said he accepted the Department of Homeland Security's request for a delay so that it can prepare for a transition to a new regime of dealing with the migrants.

"This transition period is critical to ensuring that DHS can continue to carry out its mission to secure the nation's borders and to conduct its border operations in an orderly fashion," Emmet wrote in his ruling.

But, he added, that after finding the use of Title 42 deeply wrong, he was granting the stay "with great reluctance," and indicated it could not remain in place for any appeal of his decision to a higher court.

The stay will be lifted on December 21, Sullivan said.

Tuesday's ruling came after a lawsuit brought in January by the American Civil Liberties Union, which accused the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol of "summary expulsion" of vulnerable families seeking asylum, including those who showed no signs of Covid infection.