A judge appointed by President-elect Donald Trump in his first term has blocked a key portion of President Joe Biden’s program to give a path to citizenship to immigrants who marry U.S. citizens, likely scuttling the program in the final days of the Biden Administration.
Biden made re-uniting families caught in the anti-immigration wave of the Trump Administration a top priority in his presidency. In June, he ordered the Department of Homeland Security to begin the Keeping Families Together initiative. Using discretionary authority section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), the program allowed the spouses and children of undocumented immigrants to be granted parole and apply for legal citizenship without being deported first. This would prevent families from being separated while their legal claims are processed.
The program immediately faced legal backlash from Republican attorneys general led by Texas’s Ken Paxton. The matter wound up in the court of U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker, who was appointed by Trump. Barker ruled that the program exceeded Biden’s executive authority. The Biden Administration may appeal the ruling, but the matter will likely not be decided before Trump takes office in January.
Trump, who ran on a hardline anti-immigrant platform, is unlikely to continue the program once in office. He famously separated children from parents when families crossed the border, whether they were legal asylum seekers or not. The matter became a national disgrace, with heartbreaking images of children in sloppily constructed pens that resembled dog kennels. When Biden took office, hundreds of families were displaced and unable to reconnect. Reuniting them was a project that took years and which is still not completed.
The separation program was orchestrated by Trumps’s political advisor Stephen Miller, now a Texas-based political strategist with America First Legal who has pioneered many challenges to Biden, including this one. He has long associated with white nationalists online. Miller believed that the cruelty of separating families would reduce illegal border crossings, a belief that was not supported by evidence. As many families were fleeing civil unrest and violence in their own countries, the risk of separation was a minor deterrent.
Trump is expected to immediately return the U.S. to hardline anti-immigrant policies and has promised sweeping deportations of all undocumented immigrants. This will almost certainly include some of the roughly 500,000 people who might otherwise have been able to stay in the country under the Keeping Families Together program.
Paxton celebrated the ruling on Friday.
“Once again we have stopped the Biden-Harris Administration’s radical attempts to destroy America’s borders and undermine the rule of law,” Paxton said. “This unlawful parole scheme would have rewarded more than 1 million illegal aliens with citizenship and incentivized millions more to break into our country. I look forward to the day when the federal government starts following the law again.”
