A Texas judge issued a stunning blow to the Biden administration Wednesday, “indefinitely” enjoining the White House from enforcing the president’s executive order declaring a 100-day moratorium on deportations.
As The Daily Wire reported Tuesday, the same federal judge, Judge Drew Tipton, already issued a temporary ban on enforcing President Joe Biden’s executive order, noting that the administration failed “to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations.”
“This preliminary injunction is granted on a nationwide basis and prohibits enforcement and implementation of the [100-day pause] in every place Defendants have jurisdiction to enforce and implement the January 20 Memorandum,” Judge Tipton wrote in the 105-page order released Wednesday morning.
“A federal judge last week ordered the Biden administration not to enforce a 100-day moratorium on deportations, but the ruling did not require the government to schedule them,” The Associated Press noted. “In recent days, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has deported immigrants to at least three countries: 15 people to Jamaica on Thursday and 269 people to Guatemala and Honduras on Friday. More deportation flights were scheduled Monday.”
In fact, according to immigration activists, deportations have continued largely unabated, partly because while the Biden administration issued the executive order as a way of distancing itself from the Trump administration’s hard-line on illegal immigration, it did not lift a separate Trump-era provision allowing ICE to “expel” certain illegal immigrants seeking asylum rather than go through a formal deportation process, under the theory that unscreened individuals from other countries are a threat to public health because they could be carrying COVID-19.
On Wednesday, Judge Tipton sided with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who challenged the executive order, saying that not only did the Biden administration provide no justification for a temporary moratorium on deportations, but that such a moratorium would place a significant financial burden on the state of Texas, which would become responsible for housing and handling deportees.
“Paxton’s office argued the state would face financial harm if undocumented immigrants were released into the state because of costs associated with health care and education, and he said the moratorium would also lure others to Texas,” according to the Texas Tribune.
“Texas claimed injury from unanticipated detention costs is sufficiently concrete and imminent. The harm is concrete or de facto because Texas incurs real financial costs in detaining criminal aliens,” Tipton said in his order.
Tipton also chastised the Biden administration for failing to consider other ways of halting deportations that would not place such a burden on state governments.
“[T]he core failure of DHS lies not in the brevity of the January 20 Memorandum or the corresponding administrative record, but instead in its omission of a rational explanation grounded in the facts reviewed and the factors considered,” Tipton said, per Politico. “This failure is fatal, as this defect essentially makes DHS’s determination to institute a 100-day pause on deportations an arbitrary and capricious choice.”
Ultimately, the ruling ends the 100-day deportation moratorium unless the Biden administration appeals Tipton’s order to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, a process that could take longer than a month, effectively rendering the issue moot.
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