The White House on Monday denounced a ruling from a federal judge in California reimposing a nationwide injunction against the Trump administration’s new asylum rules, calling it a “gift to human smugglers and traffickers.”
“Immigration and border security policy cannot be run by any single district court judge who decides to issue a nationwide injunction,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement, adding that the ruling “undermines the rule of law.”
The ruling from U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar blocks the Trump administration from enforcing its asylum policy nationwide. The measure, unveiled in July, denies asylum to migrants from Central America who cross the U.S.-Mexico border unless they have first sought protections in Mexico or a third country.
Tigar first issued a nationwide injunction halting the new asylum policy in July, but last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals narrowed the injunction to apply only to states within the circuit, including the border states of California and Arizona. The 9th Circuit’s ruling meant the Trump administration’s restrictions could take effect in New Mexico and Texas.
But in his order reimposing the nationwide injunction, Tigar wrote immigrant rights groups challenging the asylum policy have clients outside of the 9th Circuit. The organizations, he added, showed they will suffer harm unless the rule is blocked within and outside of the San Francisco-based appeals court.
The Trump administration has condemned the rise of nationwide injunctions, and in an op-ed last week, Attorney General William Barr wrote the orders “create an unfair, one-way system in which the democratically accountable government must fend off case after case to put its policy into effect, while those challenging the policy need only find a single sympathetic judge.”
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court last month to lift the injunction and allow it to fully enforce the asylum rule.
