Appellate panel finds president can’t circumvent laws that allow people to apply for asylum at the US-Mexico border
An appeals court on Friday blocked Donald Trump’s executive order suspending asylum access, a key pillar of the US president’s original plan to crack down on immigration at the southern border after he retook the White House.
A three-judge panel from the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit found that immigration laws give people the right to apply for asylum at the border, and the president can’t circumvent that.
The panel concluded that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) doesn’t authorize the president to remove the plaintiffs under “procedures of his own making”, allow him to suspend plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum or curtail procedures for adjudicating their anti-torture claims.
“The power by proclamation to temporarily suspend the entry of specified foreign individuals into the United States does not contain implicit authority to override the INA’s mandatory process to summarily remove foreign individuals,” wrote Judge J Michelle Childs, who was nominated to the bench by Joe Biden.
