By Redacción
redaccion@latinocc.com
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending access to asylum at the U.S. southern border is illegal, striking a major blow to one of the central pillars of his immigration enforcement agenda. However, the judge delayed the ruling’s effect for two weeks to give the government time to appeal.
On Jan. 20, Trump declared the situation at the border an “invasion” and said he would suspend both the physical entry of migrants and their ability to apply for asylum until he determined the crisis was over.
U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss in Washington said his ruling will take effect on July 16, giving Trump’s administration time to challenge the decision in a higher court.
In his 128-page opinion, Moss wrote that neither the Constitution nor immigration law grants the president “an extrastatutory and extraregular regime to repatriate or remove individuals from the United States without an opportunity to apply for asylum or other humanitarian protections.”
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment but is expected to appeal the decision. Trump and his advisers have repeatedly criticized court rulings that block their immigration policies, calling them judicial overreach.
Moss, an appointee of President Barack Obama, acknowledged the government is facing “enormous challenges” at the southern border and a “crushing backlog” of asylum claims. Still, he reiterated that the president has no authority to unilaterally eliminate asylum protections.
Lee Gelernt, who argued the case on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the ruling a significant victory.
“The decision ensures protection for those fleeing grave danger,” Gelernt said. “The president cannot simply declare that asylum seekers are invading the country and ignore laws passed by Congress.”
The ruling comes amid a sharp decline in illegal border crossings. The White House said Wednesday that Border Patrol agents made 6,070 arrests in June, a 30% drop from May and on track for the lowest annual total since 1966. On June 28 alone, agents reported just 137 arrests—down from more than 10,000 on the busiest days in late 2023.
The decline began in December 2023 after Mexican authorities intensified enforcement within their own territory. It continued after then-President Joe Biden enacted strict asylum restrictions in June 2024. Arrests dropped further following Trump’s return to the presidency in January, when he declared a national emergency and deployed thousands of troops to the southern border.
Trump and his allies argue that the asylum system has been widely abused. They claim it attracts migrants who know it can take years to process claims in immigration courts—years during which they can live and work in the U.S.
Advocates, however, insist that the right to seek asylum is guaranteed by both domestic law and international treaties, even for those who cross the border unlawfully. They say asylum is a vital safeguard for people fleeing persecution—one that Congress has enshrined into law and that even the president cannot override.
Asylum seekers must prove a well-founded fear of persecution based on limited grounds such as race, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social or political group.
In the executive order, Trump argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act gives presidents the authority to suspend the entry of any group deemed “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
Several immigrant rights organizations—including the Florence Project in Arizona, the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas, and RAICES in Texas—filed suit against the administration. They argued that the president wrongly equated migrants arriving at the border with an invading force.
They contended that Trump’s order amounted to a unilateral effort to nullify “… the immigration laws enacted by Congress to protect people facing persecution or torture if removed from the United States.”
In contrast, the government argued that since immigration enforcement and foreign policy fall under executive authority, the president was fully within his powers to declare an invasion.
“The determination that the United States is facing an invasion is a political question not subject to judicial review,” government lawyers wrote in their defense.
