Pro-Migration Activists on Texas Court Defeat: ‘I Am Going to Have a Stroke’

Migrants and human rights activists protest against US and Mexican migration policies at t
GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images
Neil Munro

Pro-migration advocates are feverishly denouncing a Texas judge who has ordered President Joe Biden’s border officers to follow federal law.

The much-ignored federal law requires that migrants be detained or deported pending the outcome of their courtroom plea for asylum. The judge’s decision would block the continued catch-and-release of more than 100,000 migrants per month.

“My God. This decision reads something straight off of Fox News,” said a tweet from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a “policy counsel” at the American Immigration Council. The group is a spin-off of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. He continued in a string of tweets:

I am going to have a stroke. This is warmed over Heritage Foundation propaganda from a federal judge … Jesus Christ there’s a section in here where the judge tries to examine in absentia removals just kill me now. … *screams into the void.* … This is terrifying and maddening. Judge Kacsmaryk is literally banning the Biden administration from ever ending MPP (a program that did not exist until) unless they can detain literally every person crossing the border without releasing a single person.

The decision was described August 13 in Breitbart News by Kris Kobach, the Harvard-educated former  Secretary of State of Kansas.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the Northern District of Texas ruled in the case of Texas and Missouri v. Biden that the Biden Administration’s termination of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) violated both the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), as well as federal immigration law requiring that certain illegal aliens be detained.

…

Judge Kacsmaryk’s decision ordered the Department of Homeland Security to “enforce and implement MPP in good faith until such a time as it has been lawfully rescinded in compliance with the APA and until such a time as the federal government has sufficient detention capacity to detain all aliens subject to mandatory detention under Section [1225] without releasing any aliens because of a lack of detention resources.”

The judge gave the federal government seven days to respond. The administration will appeal the decision, and senior judges will quickly decide whether or not to preserve Judge Kacsmaryk’s directive pending a time-consuming appeal.

In response, Reichlin-Melnick argued that other judges have let border agents release migrants into the United States, and besides, the decision will harm the migrants invited north by President Joe Biden’s border welcome:

I wish I could get Judge Kacsmaryk to talk to someone who’s actually been to the border and seen the terrors that MPP caused. The refugee camps. The cartel kidnappings. The murders. The rapes. Here’s what he wants to restore.

Other immigration advocates made their views clear:

“Welcome to the next 30 years of rule by Trump judges,” complained a legal writer for Slate.com.

“I am going to break down, and open that bottle of scotch, said a tweet from Daniel Tully, a pro-migration lawyer at the Justice Action Center. The center works closely with the corporate-funded United We Dream group.

However, the decision was welcomed by advocates for reduced migration, including Mark Krikorian at the Center for Immigration Studies:

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