WASHINGTON — U.S. immigration officials across the country must immediately start locking up unauthorized immigrants who’ve been convicted of certain crimes and any non-citizen awaiting final deportation, a federal judge in Texas ruled.
It’s another setback on immigration for the Biden administration, which had made arrests of immigrants awaiting deportation, and those who’ve completed felony sentences, less of a priority.
Under former President Donald Trump, immigration officials were allowed to ask state jailers to hold onto convicted felons who’d completed their sentences until federal officials could decide whether those individuals should be deported. Texas claims Biden encouraged federal agents to drop the detainer requests, leaving it up to state prison officials to decide whether to hold or release them.
U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, of Victoria, Texas, who was appointed by Trump, suspended parts of the Biden administration policies. He also ordered the government to begin keeping detailed records of every unauthorized immigrant it chooses to detain or release, who made that decision and why. The order applies nationwide. These records are to be submitted to Tipton monthly, beginning in September.
The ruling marked the fourth major judicial reversal on immigration policy for the Biden administration, all coming at the hands of Texas-based judges.
Tipton had previously blocked Biden’s call for a 100-day halt on all deportations. Other judges ordered Biden to reinstate Trump’s policy of forcing migrants seeking asylum to wait in Mexico and struck down an Obama-era program that shields undocumented immigrant children known as Dreamers from deportation.
Tipton’s preliminary injunction ruling Thursday came at the request of Texas and Louisiana. They sued claiming Biden’s loosened detention policies were returning convicted criminal migrants back into communities instead of keeping them in prison or shipping them out of the country.
The Biden administration argued federal immigration agents were exercising discretion, allowed to them under the law, to prioritize scarce resources to lock up and deport the most dangerous immigrants.
“The government has instructed federal officials that ‘shall detain’ certain aliens means ‘may detain’ when it unambiguously means must,” Tipton wrote in a 160-page opinion. “The executive branch may not instruct its officers to enforce a statute in a manner contrary to the law itself.”
