Biden’s ‘shameful’ asylum restrictions will face legal challenge: ‘It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now’

President Joe Biden’s latest executive action to ban people seeking asylum from crossing the US-Mexico border will face legal challenges from civil rights groups that successfully overturned immigration rules under Donald Trump’s administration.

Under Biden’s plan announced on Tuesday, the US will effectively shut down asylum claims once the number of daily border encounters reaches 2,500 at ports of entry, and will only reopen once those daily encounters decline to 1,500.

Critics have warned that such an action upends international guarantees that protect asylum rights for people on US soil, and will endanger the lives of thousands of people fleeing violence, instability and corruption below the southern border.

Biden’s executive order also mirrors an illegal Trump-era plan that was rejected by a federal judge as an unlawful attempt to “rewrite” the nation’s immigration laws to “impose a condition that Congress has expressly forbidden.”

That decision followed a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, which now plans to challenge Biden’s actions in court.

“It was illegal when Trump did it, and it is no less illegal now,” according to Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

As The Independent previously reported, Biden’s order invokes Section 212(f) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows the president to suspend immigration for anyone determined to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States” – the same authority that Trump used to unilaterally ban immigrants from majority-Muslim countries, which was later struck down in court.

Biden’s order will put “thousands of lives at risk,” Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, added