Multiple organizations have taken legal action against the Biden administration regarding an executive order that seeks to halt the influx of illegal immigration into the nation.
The ACLU initiated a lawsuit on Wednesday to challenge President Joe Biden’s executive order, which temporarily halts new asylum requests after an average of 2,500 illegal border crossings per day over the course of a week. This legal action follows a commitment made by the organization on the day Biden announced the order. In addition to the ACLU, other immigration advocacy groups, including the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, have joined the lawsuit on behalf of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.
The lawsuit specifically names Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a defendant, along with all agencies under the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and various other key federal immigration agency leaders.
“We were left with no alternative but to sue,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “The administration lacks unilateral authority to override Congress and bar asylum based on how one enters the country, a point the courts made crystal clear when the Trump administration unsuccessfully tried a near-identical ban.”
The executive order issued by President Biden was made public last week. This order will remain in effect until two weeks after there has been a seven-day average of fewer than 1,500 encounters along the southern border. Throughout Biden’s tenure, Border Patrol has encountered approximately seven million unauthorized immigrants between ports of entry, and public opinion polls consistently indicate low approval ratings for his approach to immigration.
“The Biden administration’s actions effectively shut the door on countless individuals fleeing violence and persecution. Anti-asylum policies are cruel, ineffective, and unlawfully undermine the fundamental right to seek asylum in the United States,” Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, said.
The executive order will “effectively shut off any access to asylum protections for the vast majority of people arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border” and is “flatly inconsistent with the asylum statute that Congress enacted,” the ACLU wrote in its press release.
