WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court waded into a political clash Wednesday between the Biden administration and Republican-led states seeking to defend a signature Trump-era immigration rule that the new administration has abandoned.

Conservative and liberal Supreme Court justices acknowledged during arguments at the high court that when a new administration comes in, it can change policy. That’s what the Biden administration did with the Trump-era “public charge” rule that denied green cards to immigrants who use food stamps or other public benefits.

The question for the court is not the legality of the now defunct Trump-era rule, just whether a group of states led by Arizona should be able to pick up the legal fight over it.

Justice Elena Kagan suggested to Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, arguing for the group of states, that allowing the group to intervene in a case “that’s completely dead that never applied to you in the first place” is not the answer. “Whoever the federal government is, there’s always going to be a state that thinks it’s done the wrong thing,” she said. Other justices suggested a limited right to intervene might be possible.

Kagan, for her part, did question whether the Biden administration had erred by maneuvering to quickly jettison the Trump-era rule rather than going through a longer process. Justice Samuel Alito said the administration had devised a strategy to quickly set aside the rule and he wasn’t “aware of a precedent where an incoming administration has done anything quite like this.”

Kagan and other justices suggested that if Arizona objected to the way the Biden administration ended the previous policy, however, it should have brought that issue to a court rather than attempting what Kagan described as a “quadruple bank shot” strategy to intervene in other cases.

Another issue for several of the justices: geography. Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor were among the justices who questioned why Arizona belongs in a case that has its origins in California and Washington. “I’ve seen how Los Angeles has spread, but I don’t think it’s yet spread to Arizona,” said Breyer, who last month announced his plans to retire from the court.

At the center of the case before the justices is a federal law says that green card applicants can’t be burdens to the country or “public charges.” But the Trump administration significantly expanded the definition, saying the use of public benefits including food stamps or Medicaid could be disqualifying. That led to court challenges, but the Supreme Court allowed the policy to take effect while those continued.

The Biden administration rescinded the rule and has since announced new guidelines. The administration says that in practice, in the year the rule was in effect, it only affected about five out of some approximately 50,000 applications it was applied to. The Biden administration and immigration groups have said the bigger impact of the rule was scaring immigrants, causing them to drop benefits or not enroll in them because of fears doing so could affect their applications to become legal permanent residents.

Despite the political nature of Wednesday’s arguments, they did underscore one point of agreement between the Trump administration and the Biden administration. In the case of the public charge rule, a single federal judge in Illinois ruled to block the policy nationwide. The Trump administration had criticized similar nationwide injunctions by a single judge blocking a policy nationwide, calling them unlawful. Attorney Brian Fletcher, representing the Biden administration, said that view is shared by the new administration.

In addition to Arizona, the states involved in the case are Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department on Tuesday rescinded a Trump-era memo that established a “zero tolerance” enforcement policy for migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, which resulted in thousands of family separations.

Acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson issued the new memo to federal prosecutors across the nation, saying the department would return to its longstanding previous policy and instructing prosecutors to act on the merits of individual cases.

“Consistent with this longstanding principle of making individualized assessments in criminal cases, I am rescinding — effective immediately — the policy directive,” Wilkinson wrote.

Wilkinson said the department’s principles have “long emphasized that decisions about bringing criminal charges should involve not only a determination that a federal offense has been committed and that the admissible evidence will probably be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction, but should also take into account other individualized factors, including personal circumstances and criminal history, the seriousness of the offense, and the probable sentence or other consequences that would result from a conviction.”

The “zero tolerance” policy meant that any adult caught crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted for illegal entry. Because children cannot be jailed with their family members, families were separated and children were taken into custody by Health and Human Services, which manages unaccompanied children at the border.

While the rescinding of “zero tolerance” is in part symbolic, it undoes the Trump administration’s massively unpopular policy responsible for the separation of more than 5,500 children from their parents at the U.S-Mexico border. Most families have not been prosecuted under zero tolerance since 2018, when the separations were halted, though separations have continued on a smaller scale. Practically, the ending of the policy will affect mostly single men who have entered the country illegally. Prosecutions had dropped sharply after the Trump administration declared a pandemic-related health emergency that allows them to immediately expel Mexicans and many Central Americans without applying immigration laws.

“While policies may change, our mission always remains the same: to seek justice under the law,” Wilkinson wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

President Joe Biden has issued an executive order to undo some of Trump’s restrictive policies, but the previous administration has so altered the immigration landscape that it will take quite a while to untangle all the major changes. Some of the parents separated from their children were deported. Advocates for the families have called on Biden to allow those families to reunite in the United States.

Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, along with Trump and other top leaders in his administration, were bent on curbing immigration. The “zero tolerance” policy was one of several increasingly restrictive policies aimed at discouraging migrants from coming to the Southern border. Trump’s administration also vastly reduced the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. and all but halted asylum at the border, through a combination of executive orders and regulation changes.

The policy was a disaster; there was no system created to reunite children with their families. A report from the Justice Department’s inspector general, released earlier this month, found that the policy led to a $227 million funding shortfall. Children suffered lasting emotional damage from the separations, and the policy was criticized as grossly inhumane by world leaders.

The policy began April 6, 2018, under an executive order that was issued without warning to other federal agencies that would have to manage the policy, including the U.S. Marshals Service and Health and Human Services. It was halted June 20, 2018. A federal judge ordered the families to be reunited.

The watchdog report also found that Sessions and other top officials knew the children would be separated under the policy and encouraged it. Justice officials ignored concerns from staff about the rollout and did not bother to set up a system to track families in order to reunite them. Some children are still separated.

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