Is COVID Over at the Border?

Press Releases

July 14, 2021

Texas, IRLI file reply showing need for resumed health-code expulsions

WASHINGTON—This week, the State of Texas, in its lawsuit against Biden’s abandonment of immigration-related public-health protocols, filed a brief highlighting the administration’s continued failure to protect the nation’s health by expelling illegal aliens from countries where COVID is epidemic. The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) represents Texas as Outside Counsel in the case.

The brief Texas filed on Monday—and then argued in open court on Tuesday—points out what the administration elsewhere admits: that COVID very much remains a serious threat from immigrants coming from our southern border and from other COVID-prevalent areas. A new strain, more deadly than the original, has appeared in India, prompting the administration to restrict entry from that country. A third wave of the virus, with a new surge of cases and deaths, is ravaging Mexico—the very country from which illegal aliens from around the world are pouring over the border unimpeded. Biden’s irresponsible, unlawful stand-down on expulsions, Texas’s brief contends, threatens to restart the pandemic here, and re-collapse the economy—just as states like Texas are on the path to re-opening.

“When it comes to COVID, the place we have to be most cautious is at the border, because the problem is deadlier around the world, including Mexico, than it now is here,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “Yet the border is the very place the administration has chosen to neglect on multiple levels. We hope the court sees the glaring unlawfulness of that stand-down, and—in light of the public interest—quickly enjoins it.”

The case is Texas v. Biden, No. 4:21-cv-00579-P (N.D. Tex.).

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