COVID-19
Supreme Court deals blow to Biden administration on Title 42
The Biden administration was set to end Title 42 on December 21, but the Supreme Court Tuesday said the government could not halt the expulsion of migrants for public health reasons under the Title 42 program.
Former President Trump put the program in place during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to stop the spread of infections from coming into the United States by untested migrants. The Supreme Court concluded Title 42 must continue while courts assess a lawsuit filed by Republican officials in 19 states who say ending the Title 42 policy would unleash a national “catastrophe.”
USA Today reports that while they are halting the suspension of the program, “the justices announced they will hear arguments about the program in the upcoming year, but limited their review to whether the conservative states may intervene in the litigation. Oral arguments are expected in February. In the meantime, expulsions will continue.”
USA Today writes:
Title 42 permits Customs and Border Protection agents to expel migrants without the usual legal review to Mexico or to their home countries to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in holding facilities. Title 42 has been used to expel migrants more than 2.4 million times since its implementation in 2020 and has bottled up tens of thousands of migrants in Mexican border cities who are waiting to request asylum in the United States.
The Biden administration announced in April that it intended to wind down the Title 42 policy because vaccines and therapeutics had eased the impact of the virus. Separately, a federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled in November that the way the program was created violated the law and ordered the administration to end it by Dec. 21. That mandate was temporarily paused by the Supreme Court.
Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would have denied the emergency request from the states and allowed the administration to lift the Title 42 policy, the order noted.
Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented from the court’s ruling Tuesday, joined by Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Gorsuch wrote that the court’s decision on the states’ emergency request was “unwise,” because COVID-19, the emergency on which those (Title 42) orders were premised, has long since lapsed.
“The only plausible reason for stepping in,” Gorsuch said, has to do with the states’ concerns about immigration and the situation on the border.
“But the current border crisis is not a COVID crisis,” Gorsuch added. “And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement that the Biden administration would comply with the high court’s ruling. She also said the administration is advancing its “preparations to manage the border in a secure, orderly, and humane way when Title 42 eventually lifts and will continue expanding legal pathways for immigration.
“Title 42 is a public health measure, not an immigration enforcement measure, and it should not be extended indefinitely,” she added.
COVID-19
Bombshell: State Department Funded Foreign Organizations That Promoted the Censorship of Reporters, Conservatives
This outlet has obtained a letter sent by U.S. Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding the “the State Department’s funding of foreign organizations that have promoted the censorship of American citizens.”
The New York Post published an exclusive article on the bombshell story:
The State Department sought to denigrate two reporters and a member of Congress as part of damage control attempts over having helped fund an advertisers’ “blacklist” of The Post and other outlets allegedly spreading “misinformation,” according to internal documents.
In March 2023, the department distributed press guidance about how to counter bombshell reports by “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi and Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminskyconcerning the State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).
Taibbi’s first report about the GEC, in a lengthy Twitter thread published Jan. 3, 2023, revealed efforts to pressure US social media platforms early in the COVID-19 pandemic to censor Americans online, purportedly to counter “disinformation.”
Banks’ letter explains the scenario of Gabe Kaminsky, the Washington Examiner reporter who “Published a series of articles outlining the State Department’s funding of a ‘disinformation’-related non-governmental organization called the Global Disinformation Index (GDI). GDI had been maintaining a list of up to 200 news outlets that allegedly publish disinformation and then sending their list to advertising companies”
The Post continues:
Taibbi testified to Congress in March of 2023: “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”
Kaminsky also uncovered a $100,000 grant from GEC to the London-based Global Disinformation Index (GDI) in 2021 and 2022, an entity that calls itself “the world’s first rating of the media sites based on the risk of the outlet carrying disinformation.”
Despite GEC’s mandate proclaiming that it is only involved in international affairs, GDI went on to concoct a blacklist of 10 outlets, including The Post, with conservative or libertarian-leaning opinion sections in an effort to demonetize them, The Post continues.
Ad associations further participated in GDI’s efforts to blacklist the media outlets, though some called the list “bewildering” for having “somehow placed the NYPost [sic] as ‘at most risk’ paper in the USA for disinformation.”
Both the GEC grant, distributed between October 2021 and March 2022, and another $756,923 government-funded grant from the National Endowment for Democracy to GDI, have not been renewed.
The State Department records, exclusively obtained by The Post, make no mention of these taxpayer-funded entities’ conduct, choosing instead to fault Taibbi, Kaminsky and now-X owner Elon Musk for spreading alleged falsehoods about GEC.
Banks’ letter continues:
An interim report that was released by the House Committee on Small Business last week confirms GDI’s support for domestic censorship and confirms that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and the National Endowment for Democracy sent GDI a combined nearly $1 million dollars in grants. The report also explains that the GEC privately supported GDI in its interactions with U.S. tech companies.
In response to Mr. Kaminsky’s reporting, the State Department sent out press guidance defending its attempted suppression of U.S. news organizations. That guidance misleadingly changes a quote that I sent to Gabe Kaminsky and the Washington Examiner criticizing the GEC. The intentional misquotation gives the impression that I had been speaking with a Russian propaganda outlet.
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