President Joe Biden’s nominee to replace Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, previously struck down border controls sought by former President Trump.
Jackson, appointed by Biden to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year, previously served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where she ruled on a handful of immigration cases.
In 2019, the pro-mass immigration group Make the Road New York sued the Trump administration for its expanded expedited removal of illegal aliens.
Whereas expedited removal had long only applied to illegal aliens who crossed by land, were encountered near the border, and had been in the U.S. for no longer than 14 days, Trump sought to expand the process to include illegal aliens encountered across the U.S. for up to two years after they arrived.
Though the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed the ruling, Jackson issued a preliminary injunction to halt Trump’s expanded expedited removal policy on the grounds that the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and did not sufficiently weigh the impact that the policy would have on illegal aliens.
In a separate case, Kiakombua v. Wolf, the Trump administration sought to reduce asylum fraud among border crossers with an updated United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officer training known as the “Credible Fear Lesson Plan” which required those claiming asylum to certify in initial screenings if they were eligible for asylum.
Ultimately, Jackson struck down the training to tighten up asylum fraud.
“… because the unlawful provisions of the Lesson Plan cannot be severed from the remainder of the document, this Court finds that the entire document must be vacated, which is a remedy that the Court retains full equitable power to order under the circumstances presented in this case,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson’s judicial record on immigration, though, is mixed, as she also previously ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s construction of border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, finding that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary has broad authority to waive environmental laws.
Likewise, in Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center v. Wolf, Judge Jackson upheld two asylum-related programs created by the Trump administration to more quickly process asylum screenings from recently arrived illegal aliens while holding them in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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