President Joe Biden cannot limit Immigration and Customs Enforcement‘s legal duty to arrest illegal aliens after states release them from prison, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.
Biden issued two directives earlier this year to create enforcement priorities for immigration officials.
Biden intended the orders to prevent agents from arresting most illegal aliens by prioritizing only the most heinous offenders—drug dealers, rapists and murderers.
U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee, granted the plaintiffs, Texas and Louisiana, a preliminary injunction to suspend the directives while the lawsuit proceeds.
Tipton said Texas and Louisiana had to pay more to arrest and detain illegal aliens because the federal government refused to uphold its legal responsibility.
“The Court concludes the potential harms to the States arising out of the Memoranda outweigh any potential harms to the Government,” he wrote. “The Court also concludes the public interest is served, rather than undermined, by an injunction,” he wrote.
Biden enacted the policies with a similar legal tactic that former President Barack Obama employed when he instituted the unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Rather than suspending immigration enforcement outright—which likely would require legislative action beyond the scope of his authority—Biden tried to suspend it in fact by telling immigration agents not to worry about the vast majority of illegal aliens.
Tipton wrote that he could not find a rational basis to exclude certain illegal aliens from ICE’s purview.
“In sum, the Government’s failure to rationally explain and connect the basis for the new guidance, along with the Government’s failure to consider certain relevant factors and alternative policies, establish that there is a substantial likelihood that the reprioritization is an arbitrary and capricious policy,” he wrote.
Tipton ordered the Biden administration to report to him by Sept. 3 with a new plan for enforcing all existing immigration laws.
