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ARIZONA v. MAYORKAS 

Statement of GORSUCH, J. 

health justification for the orders had lapsed.  The States 
also understood that their lawsuit would only require the 
government to take certain additional procedural steps be-
fore ending the Title 42 orders.  But the States apparently
calculated  that  even  a  short,  court-ordered  extension  of 
those  decrees  was  worth  the  fight.  Worth  it  because,  in 
their judgment, a new and different crisis had emerged at 
the border and the federal government had done too little
to  address  it.3    Keeping  the  Title  42  orders  in  place  even 
temporarily was better than the alternative.  In the end, the 
district court agreed with the States’ APA arguments and 
entered  a  nationwide  injunction  that  effectively  required 
the government to enforce the Title 42 orders until and un-
less it complied with the statute’s notice-and-comment pro-
cedures.4 

Meanwhile,  a  thousand  miles  away,  a  group  of  asylum 
seekers filed a competing class-action lawsuit in a federal 
district court in Washington, D. C.  This group argued that,
from the start, the government lacked legal authority to is-
sue its Title 42 orders.  Ultimately, the D. C. district court 
agreed with the group’s assessment and issued an equally 
sweeping form of relief—sometimes called “universal vaca-
tur”—that  purported  to  wipe  the  Title  42  orders  off  the 
books as if they never existed.5  So it is that the federal gov-
ernment found itself in an unenviable spot—bound by two
inconsistent nationwide commands, one requiring it to en-
force the Title 42 orders and another practically forbidding
it from doing so.

If  these  head-spinning  developments  were  not  enough, 
more  followed.    Displeased  with  the  D. C.  district  court’s 
ruling, some of the States in the Louisiana case moved to 
intervene in the D. C. case.  The States said they wanted to 

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3 Id., at 417. 
4 Id., at 441. 
5 Huisha-Huisha v. Mayorkas, 2022 WL 16948610, *15 (Nov. 15, 2022).