The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said on June 4 that it would file a lawsuit over President Joe Biden’s executive order limiting the number of people applying for asylum at the southern border.
President Biden’s June 4 order blocks the entry of noncitizens if the secretary of Homeland Security determines “there has been a 7-consecutive-calendar-day average of 2,500 encounters or more,” meaning it should immediately take effect given the high number of encounters already taking place at the border.
The president announced the order amid swelling border numbers and public disapproval over his handling of the ongoing crisis. In his announcement, he accused Congress 0f failing to provide necessary resources and not moving forward on a bipartisan immigration proposal.
Most Americans, or 56 percent, say President Biden’s administration has hurt the country on the issue of immigration and border security, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in April. That’s far higher than the 37 percent who said the same about President Trump’s time in office.
Even among Democrats, only about three in 10 say that President Biden has done more to help the country on immigration and border security, while about the same share say it has hurt. Nearly nine in 10 Republicans say the Trump presidency helped on this issue.
Legal Challenges
The order contains multiple exceptions, including for unaccompanied children and victims of “a severe form of trafficking in persons.”The Trump campaign said in a statement that the order would not be effective and that if “Biden truly wanted to shut down the border, he could do so with a swipe of the same pen.”
The ACLU also accused President Biden of taking “the same approach as the Trump administration’s asylum ban.”
Both President Biden’s order and some of President Trump’s immigration restrictions cited the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). Section 212(f) of the act allows presidents to block the entry of “any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States” when he finds that their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Lee Gerlent, who serves as deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, compared President Biden’s policy with President Trump’s policies in a statement.
“We intend to challenge this order in court,” he said. “It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now.”
The ACLU challenged President Trump’s asylum restrictions, which encountered several roadblocks in federal courts. The asylum policy, introduced in 2019, prohibited most migrants from applying for asylum in the United States if they passed through another country on their way to America but did not apply for asylum there.
After President Biden entered office, he revoked President Trump’s travel policies, describing them as “a stain on our national conscience and are inconsistent with our long history of welcoming people of all faiths and no faith at all.”
In his June 4 remarks, President Biden attempted to distance himself from President Trump by saying: “I will never demonize immigrants. I will never refer to immigrants as ”‘poisoning the blood’ of a country.” He was referring to a phrase President Trump used in 2023.
Before the June 4 order, the Biden administration’s handling of the southern border had already encountered challenges in multiple courts. In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the administration has been challenging a Texas law that seeks to deter illegal immigration at the state level.
