The Trump administration popped champagne corks after a Trump-appointed federal judge early Wednesday allowed Asylum Ban 2.0 to continue, but the bubbles quickly fizzed out when a second federal judge later that day blocked the rule change. “The California judge's preliminary injunction halts the policy while the lawsuit plays out in court,” The New York Times reported.
Under this inhumane policy, families from elsewhere who pass through Mexico would have been denied asylum at the U.S. southern border, vastly affecting not just Central Americans, but also others from countries such as Cuba and Venezuela. It would also have affected thousands who have been waiting along the border, some for weeks and months, for their chance to ask for asylum.
“As he granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday, Judge Jon Tigar, who was appointed by former president Barack Obama, said the Trump administration had overstepped by making a radical change to established asylum law,” BuzzFeed News reported. “Under our laws, the right to determine whether a particular group of applicants is categorically barred from eligibility for asylum is conferred on Congress,” he wrote.
An asylum officer had also told BuzzFeed that she would refuse to carry out the inhumane policy, saying that others at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services also felt that it was “racist and illegal.” She said she found out about the policy just as everyone else did: by reading the news. She was horrified, she said, when she finally got the official email from the administration. “I saw it right as I was coming to work. We’re all aghast.”
The “ruling is an important victory for incredibly vulnerable individuals and families from besieged Central American countries seeking refuge in our country,” said Melissa Crow of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Project, one of the groups that took the administration to court. “We will continue to fight this draconian policy as well as the myriad of others through which the Trump administration continues to wage war on asylum-seekers and our nation’s asylum system.”