Federal judge blocks Trump asylum ban
A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from denying asylum to migrants who crossed the southern border illegally, saying the president violated a “clear command” from Congress to allow them to apply.
In a ruling late Monday, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar of San Francisco issued a nationwide restraining order barring enforcement of the policy President Donald Trump announced Nov. 8, which he billed as an urgent attempt to stop the flow of thousands of asylumseeking families across the border each month.
The government had said it would allow only people who cross at legal checkpoints to request asylum. Those entering elsewhere could seek a temporary form of protection that is harder to win and doesn’t yield full citizenship. The changes would amount to a transformation of longestablished asylum procedures, codified both at the international level and by Congress.
“Whatever the scope of the President’s authority, he may not rewrite the immigration laws to impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden,” wrote the judge, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the federal bench in 2012. Tigar reasoned that the “failure to comply with entry requirements such as arriving at a designated port of entry should bear little, if any, weight in the asylum process.”
The Trump administration said Tuesday it will continue to press the matter in court.
Several thousand migrants are now waiting to cross a legal entry point at San Ysidro in San Diego, across from Tijuana. Many are from a caravan that drew Trump’s wrath in the weeks leading up to the midterm election, when he made illegal immigration his closing argument and asserted without evidence that the caravan included “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners.”
Labeling the movements of Central American migrants a “national emergency,” Trump deployed thousands of active-duty troops and coils of concertina wire to the border. Military officials have indicated they are weighing whether to redeploy some of those troops.
A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue, said Tuesday that the military was examining whether Tigar’s order changes anything for their operations. However, U.S. troops already had been acting only in a support role to the Department of Homeland Security, with only incidental contact with migrants expected.
Tigar said the president could not shift asylum policy on his own. The judge’s order will remain in effect until Dec. 19, at which point the court will consider arguments for a permanent block of the policy.
The Trump administration suggested the defeat could be temporary, alluding to a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in June that upheld a revised version of Trump’s travel ban, an effort to bar foreigners from certain majority-Muslim nations and other countries from the United States.