Federal judge blocks policy prioritizing some migrants for arrest

A federal judge in Texas temporarily halted the Biden administration’s policy of focusing immigration arrests on those with serious criminal convictions, delivering the latest legal blow to the administration’s immigration agenda.

Following a lawsuit by Texas and Louisiana, U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton of the Southern District of Texas, who previously blocked the administration’s 100-day deportation moratorium in a separate case, ruled the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement guidance narrowing immigration enforcement priorities is likely illegal.

That guidance, laid out in a February memo, instructed ICE agents to prioritize migrants who recently crossed the border and immigrants who pose a public safety or national security threat, and to obtain supervisory approval to detain immigrants who fell outside of those categories.

The judge held that legal provisions stating the federal government “shall take” certain categories of immigrants into custody means that the government “must detain” them. The Biden administration’s memo setting out immigration priorities is “wholly contrary” to those provisions, Tipton said.

The memo’s enforcement priorities “implement and enforce a policy that directly contravenes congressional mandates,” he wrote in an 160-page opinion. “Agency policies that contravene congressional mandates are unlawful — plain and simple.”

Tipton also concluded the federal government failed to reasonably explain why it chose to prioritize those categories of immigrants and skirted procedural requirements when implementing the guidance.

Responding to government lawyers’ concerns that striking down the immigration guidance would cause confusion at ICE, the judge added that the government “is free to craft new guidance or instruct Executive Branch officials to act in a certain manner so long as such guidance and instructions comport with the law.”

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry praised Thursday’s ruling.

“The fact that a judge had to tell the President of the United States to comply with standing law is shameful,” he said in a statement. “We are a Nation of law and order; dangerous and violent criminal aliens must not be allowed to roam free in our communities.”

Representatives for ICE and the Texas attorney general’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Tipton’s decision is the latest in a series of court ruling by federal judges in Texas thwarting the Biden administration’s attempt to reset immigration policies and priorities following the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, who also sits on the federal court for Texas’ Southern District, ruled last month against the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives work permits and deportation relief to certain undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

The judge kept the immigration program in place for current recipients for now, but barred the government from accepting new applicants.

Last week, U.S. District Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas ordered the Biden administration to reinstate within seven days a Trump-administration program requiring asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for decisions in their U.S. immigration court cases.

The government has requested an emergency reprieve from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to rule on that request imminently.