US Raises Justices’ Abortion Pill Ruling to Fight DACA Lawsuit

The Biden administration is urging the Fifth Circuit to find that Texas doesn’t have standing to challenge federal regulations protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrant dreamers from deportation, pointing to the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling on an abortion medication.

In a Monday letter to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a Justice Department lawyer raised the justices’ 9-0 decision on June 13, which found that anti-abortion doctors that sued over Food and Drug Administration decisions on access to the abortion pill mifepristone lacked legal “standing” to bring the case. The letter said that decision “underscores that plaintiffs here lack standing” to block shields for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program.

The Justice Department said that, like the plaintiffs in the mifepristone case, “Texas asserts standing based on indirect injury from a federal policy they allege is unlawfully lax.”

“But just as '[t]eachers in border states’ may not ‘sue to challenge allegedly lax immigration policies that lead to overcrowded classrooms,’ neither may Texas sue the government whenever a federal policy increases, even indirectly, the number of immigrants in the State,” the letter said, quoting heavily from last week’s Supreme Court opinion. “Texas’s logic ‘would seemingly not end until’ all States ‘had standing to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like'—an approach ‘flatly inconsistent with Article III.’”

The high court last week reversed a Fifth Circuit decision that would’ve placed some restrictions on the medication, finding that the challenging parties didn’t prove they were actually harmed by the regulations. “The law has never permitted doctors to challenge the government’s loosening of general public safety requirements simply because more individuals might then show up at emergency rooms or in doctors’ offices with follow-on injuries,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote.

The Fifth Circuit is currently reviewing a September ruling by US District Judge Andrew Hanen of the US District Court of the Southern District of Texas, which found President Joe Biden’s rule shielding Dreamers from deportation is unlawful.

Hanen said the new effort “suffers from the same legal impediments” as the Obama-era memorandum that first launched the DACA program. The Fifth Circuit has already ruled that the earlier action is unlawful.

The case is: State of Texas v. USA, 5th Cir., No. 23-40653, Letter