The American Civil Liberties Union organization put the Biden administration on notice of forthcoming legal action over the White House’s newly announced asylum ban.
“BREAKING: The Biden administration just announced an executive order that will severely restrict people’s legal right to seek asylum, putting tens of thousands of lives at risk,” the ACLU posted on X Tuesday afternoon.
“This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration’s asylum ban. We will be challenging,” the ACLU said.
President Joe Biden took action on Tuesday to bar virtually all migrants from seeking asylum at the U.S. southern border.
“President Biden is issuing a presidential proclamation that will temporarily suspend the entry of noncitizens across the southern border,” said a senior administration official who briefed reporters about the executive order Tuesday morning.
In 2018, President Donald Trump’s administration published rules to block migrants who came across the southern border “unlawfully” from “eligibility for asylum.”
At the time, the ACLU posted on Twitter that neither the “president nor his cabinet can override the clear commands of our law.”
A second administration official told reporters that the White House did expect to face criticism and even lawsuits as a result of the asylum ban.
“While the rule may be challenged, as was the case with the circumvention of lawful pathways regulation, we look forward to defending [it] … as any litigation that might be filed progresses in the next few days,” the second official said.
The executive order, along with two rules issued by the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, will take effect immediately and allow federal law enforcement to quickly remove migrants after they cross illegally and are apprehended. It does this by not allowing migrants in custody to request asylum, thus allowing federal police to immediately remove them from the country.
Under the new process, migrants will only go through a screening process to see if they have a credible fear for seeking asylum if they specifically “express a fear of return to their country or country of removal, a fear of persecution or torture, or an intention to apply for asylum.”
“The bottom line is that the standard will be significantly higher, and so we do anticipate that fewer individuals will be screened in as a result,” the same official said.
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Under the new protocols, the asylum ban will remain in effect if the seven-day average of migrants apprehended by Border Patrol agents between the ports of entry is above 2,500 arrests per day.
The ban will only be walked back if the seven-day average of migrants arrested drops to below 1,500 apprehensions daily, according to the administration officials.