President Biden will overturn a series of Trump-era immigration court victories with executive orders aimed at undoing “the gravest damages of the Trump administration.”
Biden early Wednesday morning announced 17 orders that he plans to sign hours after taking office. These include reversals of Trump’s climate policies, as well as his immigration stances, his coronavirus response, and his policies on sexual orientation. Biden’s immigration orders, in effect, undo some of the outgoing administration’s hardest-fought victories at the Supreme Court.
Biden will sign an order undoing Trump’s exclusion of noncitizens from the census and the apportionment of congressional representatives. Trump in July ordered that illegal immigrants be excluded from the counts used in congressional redistricting, a move that earned him a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union as it called the move unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court in December ruled that it could not decide on the ACLU’s case, finding that it was too early to tell if the Trump administration’s plan would break the law. The decision was widely seen as a victory for Trump since the court declined to intervene against his orders. At the time, ACLU Voting Rights Project Dale Ho promised to take Trump back to court if the administration attempted to implement its census policy.
The Trump administration’s apportionment push, however, collapsed this weekend when the Census Bureau announced that it would not attempt to execute Trump’s orders before he left office. Trump’s census director Steve Dillingham resigned on Wednesday ahead of the Biden changes. His term was set to expire at the end of this year.
Biden also will reverse Trump’s 2017 so-called Muslim ban, which the Supreme Court upheld in 2018 with a 5-4 vote. In a majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote at the time that Trump’s order, which cut off travel from several majority-Muslim countries, “is squarely within the scope of Presidential authority.”
The Biden administration counters that the ban was a “policy rooted in religious animus and xenophobia.”
Biden’s immigration orders touch on litigation that is currently before the Supreme Court. Another one of his executive orders undoes the national emergency proclamation that Trump made in 2019 to secure funding for the Mexican border wall. Biden’s order effectively halts funding to the border wall while its legality is examined.
The Trump administration in 2019 faced a lawsuit attempting to do the same. The Supreme Court took it up in 2020 and decided in favor of Trump, while other legal challenges continued. This year, the court took up another border wall funding challenge originally raised by several environmental groups and the states of California and New Mexico, Trump v. Sierra Club, which is set for arguments in February.
Even with Trump out of office and Biden set to kill border wall funding, California and New Mexico will continue to pursue the case, ACLU attorney Dror Ladin told the Washington Examiner. Referencing the miles of border wall constructed during Trump’s tenure, he said that the states’ ultimate goal is to dismantle the sections of the wall built while the case worked its way to the Supreme Court.
“It’s not enough to simply end construction,” he said. “The unlawfully built wall has to be dealt with.”
