Why Judges Are Basically in Charge of U.S. Immigration Policy Now

When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a new lawsuit against the Biden Administration last week challenging the allegedly “unlawful” move to grant asylum officers authority to decide some asylum cases, no one was surprised. It’s the 11th immigration-related lawsuit Paxton has filed against the Administration since President Biden took office.

But the Texas attorney general is hardly alone in his enthusiasm for litigation. Because Congress has failed to act meaningfully since the 1990s to reform the U.S. immigration system, immigration policy has been increasingly shaped by court challenges. In recent years, liberal and conservative attorneys general, nonprofit organizations, and individual plaintiffs have filed an avalanche of immigration-related suits in federal courts, resulting in a profusion of complex and often-contradictory court rulings, experts tell TIME. With Congress on the sidelines, federal judges are now on the frontlines of interpreting and dictating the scope of executive actions, federal guidelines and agency rules—thereby determining how U.S. immigration policy actually works.

“This is a manifestation of our broken immigration system,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law at Cornell University, tells TIME. Congress’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform has resulted in an explosion of agency rules and executive actions—which, in turn, lead to more legal challenges, he says. “Today, almost every executive action on immigration is being challenged in the courts.”

This ad-hoc system has resulted, both at the U.S.-Mexico border and within government agencies, in “peak confusion,” says Theresa Cardinal Brown, managing director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC), a Washington think tank. New federal rules or guidances are often blocked, terminated, or forcefully reinstated, sometimes with additional restrictions or requirements, just days or weeks after they were announced. Government officials, immigration lawyers, and lay people are often baffled about the contours of U.S. law, says Elora Mukherjee, professor of law at Columbia University and director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

BY JASMINE AGUILERA
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