A federal court struck down a key aspect of the Biden administration’s immigration policy that made migrants ineligible for asylum if they enter the country without going through the administration’s expanded pathways to lawful entry.
Judge Jon Tigar of the Northern District of California blocked the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways Final Rule. The policy was being challenged by left-wing immigration groups that claimed the rule was too similar to the Trump administration’s entry policies, which had also been checked in federal court.
The ruling means that U.S. border policy could revert to what it had been for “decades,” as Tigar’s order put it. Before the Trump administration, officials were required to accept asylum claims from anyone who crossed the border, according to Breitbart.
In the wake of the Trump-era Title 42 policy, which gave immigration officials more power to detain and expel unlawful migrants due to the public health emergency spurred by COVID-19, the Biden administration set up new pathways for more migrants to lawfully enter the country. One such avenue was the CBP One app, which migrants could use to schedule a lawful border crossing appointment, as reported by The Dallas Express.
Additionally, new processing centers for a special parole system were set up to facilitate the entry of up to 30,000 Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians a month, Fox News reported.
Still, even though Biden’s policy appeared more permissive than Trump’s, left-wing groups challenged the restrictions on the grounds that they were “cruel and ineffective.”
Judge Tigar also suggested that the number of lawful entrants facilitated by CBP One was too small, according to AP News.
Tigar was critical of several aspects of the Biden policy, from its procedural adoption to the effects of its implementation. The administration provided 30 days for comments on the rule before implementation, which the judge found insufficient due to the proposed policy’s complexity.
“The complexity of the Rule suggests that 30 days is unreasonable, particularly because the agencies were preparing for the end of Title 42 well before it was announced, such that they could have issued the Notice with sufficient time to grant a longer comment period and still have had the Rule in place when Title 42 expired,” Tigar wrote, according to Fox News.
“The agencies also did not disclose other, relevant policy changes that would affect the agencies’ reasoning for adopting the Rule, including one that controverted an assumption central to the agencies’ projection of post-Title 42 encounters at the southern border,” he added.
Tigar, an Obama appointee, expressed concern that Mexico was too dangerous for asylum seekers to remain in while being processed through Biden’s entry system.
“While they wait for an adjudication, applicants for asylum must remain in Mexico, where migrants are generally at heightened risk of violence by both state and non-state actors,” Tigar wrote, according to AP News.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reacted to the ruling with a statement on Tuesday. He said his department “strongly disagree[s] with today’s ruling and [is] confident that the Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule is lawful.” He also noted that the Justice Department would seek a stay on the order, per Fox News.
“To be clear, because the district court temporarily stayed its decision, today’s ruling does not change anything immediately,” Mayorkas said. “It does not limit our ability to deliver consequences for unlawful entry.”
The political right is also challenging the rule. In March, Republican attorneys general from 22 states authored a letter of opposition to the proposed rule, predicting that the massive increase in lawful migration that it would allegedly facilitate would be “little more than an academic exercise that tries to define the problem away by re-characterizing illegal crossings as lawful pathways.”
