Trump’s Final Immigration Drive Meets the Courts Before the Deadline

January 14, 2021, did not give the outgoing administration the clean finish it wanted. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked a Trump-era asylum rule that was scheduled to take effect on January 15, preventing the regulation from becoming operative before the transition of power. The case challenged the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review and the rule it had issued on procedures for asylum and withholding of removal. immigrantjustice.org The order came in response to a lawsuit filed on January 8 by four immigration legal service providers: the National Immigrant Justice Center, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project, and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center. According to the court record and the plaintiffs’ account, the rule was published on December 16, 2020, after a shortened comment period, and it was set to impose new procedural barriers on people seeking asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the Convention Against Torture. immigrantjustice.org The blocked rule would have tightened deadlines and added new hurdles in the asylum process, including a shorter window for filing applications after a first hearing and a $50 filing fee requirement tied to certain forms. The plaintiffs said those changes would have made the process harder for people seeking protection and especially burdensome for people without lawyers. The judge’s order meant those provisions did not go into effect on January 15. immigrantjustice.org The bigger point is simpler than the overheated politics around it: the administration was trying to finish a late-term rulemaking push, and the courts moved first. That matters because rules can create real effects even before they settle into place, but they still have to survive judicial review. Here, the court stopped this one before the effective date, which left the outgoing team with one less immigration restriction to hand off. immigrantjustice.org The result also fit the broader January pattern. By the final days of the Trump presidency, a series of immigration actions was moving through litigation and transition pressure at the same time. This case did not resolve the administration’s larger immigration agenda, but it did show that the last-minute scramble had limits: the calendar was closing, and the court was not waiting around for the paperwork to catch up. immigrantjustice.org