GOP states ramp up legal battles against Biden's immigration policies

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis addresses the border crisis: 'it's not just a humanitarian crisis, but it's also a national security crisis'As the Biden administration has been working rapidly to undo key Trump-era border and immigration policies and replace them with more liberal policies, Republican state attorneys general have been working just as hard to push back against what they see as illegal actions that could hurt Americans and put them in danger."As attorney general I have certain tools in my toolbox, and I have said I am going to do everything I can to enforce the rule of law and to protect hard-working American taxpayers," Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said in an interview with Fox News.STATES LAUNCH LEGAL EFFORT AFTER BIDEN DROPS TRUMP RULE ON IMMIGRANTS AND WELFAREArizona currently has multiples lanes of litigation it is pursuing on both legal and illegal immigration. The new ICE guidance has coincided with a dramatic decrease of arrests and deportations and the discovery process triggered by the lawsuit led to the release of an email that showed that ICE officials predicted such a drop in arrests would occur.As part of that, the states have also been able to begin deposing officials, the first depositions of which were released this month -- including an ICE official saying that the reason for the narrowing of enforcement was not due to limited resources, as the administration had claimed.Texas, Arizona and Missouri have also taken aim at the Biden administration’s rollback of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) -- a Trump-era policy which kept migrants in Mexico as they awaited their hearings. "Absent this Court’s intervention, such releases will continue for the foreseeable future."Texas and Louisiana both sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this month for its alleged refusal to take criminal illegal immigrants into custody, as part of the ICE interim guidance.Arizona has also sued over the Biden administration’s ending of border wall construction, claiming that the result has been environmental harm as hundreds of thousands of migrants make the journey and cause environmental damage on the way.The legal push by Republican states is in many ways a flip side of what Democratic states did during the Trump administration -- launching numerous lawsuits against Trump-era policies, particularly on immigration.