Free Republic

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A federal judge in Florida on Tuesday ordered the Department of Homeland Security to restore key features of its Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, including SSN-search and bulk-upload capabilities that states use to verify citizenship and immigration status for voter rolls. U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II ruled that DHS breached a court-approved settlement agreement with Florida and other states by disabling the features following a conflicting decision from a judge in Washington, D.C. Wetherell expressly disagreed with that ruling, concluding the features do not violate federal law. In June, U.S. District Judge Sparkle L....

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody won another round against the Biden administration in federal court, this time in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. On Monday, the court ruled to keep in place an injunction against the Department of Homeland Security’s parole program. The injunction was issued by a federal district judge in Florida last month. DHS appealed the judge’s ruling and lost. On May 8, U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell of the Northern District of Florida Pensacola Division vacated DHS’s “Policy on the Use of Parole Plus Alternatives to Detention to Decompress Border Locations.” On May 16, he...

A federal judge in Florida has struck down the Biden administration’s use of policies to mass release migrants into the U.S. interior is unlawful, accusing the administration of turning the border into a "meaningless line in the sand." Judge T. Kent Wetherell ruled in response to a lawsuit from the state of Florida, which alleged the administration’s mass release of migrants via humanitarian parole into Alternatives to Detention -- known as "Parole +ATD" -- is unlawful. In a scathing opinion Wednesday, Wetherell stated the Biden administration had "effectively turned the Southwest Border into a meaningless line in the sand and...