A judge appointed by former President Donald Trump sided with one of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies in a surprise ruling on Friday.
U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton ruled against Texas and 20 other Republican-led states challenging a Biden administration program that allows as many as 30,000 migrants who are seeking asylum from four countries to enter the U.S. on an emergency basis each month.
The program applies to approved migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Applicants are required to be sponsored by a person in the United States and must arrange their own travel to the country by air to participate.
As of November 2023, approximately 234,000 migrants had used the program, with each approved person being allowed to remain in the U.S. for a parole period of up to two years.
Leon Neal
Republican state leaders, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed their lawsuit seeking to strike down the program in January 2023, arguing that the policy violated immigration law and did damage to their states by increasing legal immigration.
Tipton, who was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas by Trump in 2020, ruled on Friday that the Lone Star State lacked standing to bring the lawsuit and had not demonstrated that it was “injured” by the program.
The judge noted that both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Republican states agreed that the number of migrants entering the country under the program “has dramatically decreased by as much as 44 percent.”
“Plaintiffs, therefore, are unable to demonstrate that they have been injured by the Program, and as a result, they lack standing to bring these claims,” Tipton wrote, while stressing that his ruling “does not address the lawfulness” of the policy itself.
“The Court finds that Plaintiffs have not proven that Texas has suffered an injury and therefore do not have standing to maintain this suit,” Tipton concluded.
Newsweek reached out for comment to DHS and the office of Paxton via email on Friday night.
Tipton previously had a history of ruling against Biden’s immigration policies. After Paxton sued just days after Biden took office in January 2021, the judge issued a ruling that struck down the nascent administration’s new policy of temporarily pausing the deportation of some migrants.
Tipton wrote at the time that “the threat of injury to Texas outweighs any potential harm to Defendants,” while arguing that DHS arguments supporting the deportation freeze were “unpersuasive.”
The U.S. Supreme Court eventually overturned Tipton’s ruling on appeal, concluding that the judge did not have jurisdiction to invalidate the policy in an 8-1 ruling, with only Justice Samuel Alito dissenting.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.