Several organizations sued the Biden administration over an executive order that aims to suspend the flow of illegal immigration into the country.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to strike down President Joe Biden’s executive order, which pauses new asylum requests after 2,500 daily average illegal crossings over the span of a week, following through on a pledge the organization made the day Biden announced his order. The ACLU was joined by other immigration advocacy organizations, such as the National Immigrant Justice Center and the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies, on behalf of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.
The lawsuit names Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as a defendant, every agency within the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and several other top federal immigration agency chiefs.
“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.”
Biden’s executive order was announced last week. The order will in effect until two weeks after there has been a seven-day average of fewer than 1,500 encounters along the southern border.
Border Patrol has encountered nearly seven million illegal immigrants between ports of entry duringBiden’s time in office, and poll numbers consistently show low approval marks for his handling of 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 in a statement.
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.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller New Foundation.
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