Florida Attorney General Ashely Moody on Tuesday joined her counterparts in Texas and Louisiana in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hold President Joe Biden accountable for not doing his job: enforce the law.
In this case, that means immigration law.
In a court document filed in support of a lawsuit brought by Texas against the Biden administration over its mishandling of illegal immigration, Moody, a Republican who seeks a second term as the state’s top law enforcement official, noted that Biden is allowing illegal immigration to run amok, and this failing in his constitutional duty to protect Americans.
In a statement, Moody said, “Biden’s refusal to enforce federal immigration laws passed by Congress is jeopardizing public safety, and as Attorney General, I will continue to fight in court to force this administration to do its job and protect the American people.”
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Moody noted in court records that Florida taxpayers pay a steep price for Biden’s refusal to enforce the law. The state, she wrote, pays $132 million a year to keep some 7,000 criminal illegal immigrants in jail.
Those are people who would not be in the country if Biden did his job, she argued.
Moody pointed out that current immigration law “imposes on DHS [Department of Homeland Security] a mandatory duty to arrest and remove certain criminal aliens.”
Congress mandated that “nondiscretionary duty to arrest and remove aliens” from the country in 1988, Moody wrote. Since then, lawmakers have only expanded the categories for deportation offenses to protect Americans.
The Biden administration unilaterally changed the rules in September 2021, Moody observed. The DHS created a policy to prioritize which illegals it would release.
The attorney general argued that the administration’s new rules actually gut federal law and “really means only those criminal aliens [will be deported] that DHS has decided in its unbridled discretion to remove.”
“As a result,” Moody said in court records, “DHS has authorized immigration officials to violate their duty to arrest criminal aliens when Florida releases them from state custody, which forces Florida to expend resources on supervised release and policing recidivism for criminal aliens who should be in federal custody and removed from the United States.”
Tuesday’s filing mirrored a similar action Moody submitted six months ago, when she joined Alabama and Georgia in arguing Biden is failing in his constitutional duty to enforce federal law.
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