TEXAS — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has again sued the Biden administration over its border policy, this time targeting an upcoming change to the asylum process.
This marks the 11th lawsuit Paxton has filed against Biden related to immigration and the 27th overall.
The policy will permit some migrants seeking asylum to have their cases heard and evaluated by asylum officers rather than asylum judges. The aim is to reduce backlog at immigration courts.
According to Paxton, the policy shift will “exacerbate loopholes in the illegal-alien removal process, prioritize alleged efficiency over national security and costly impacts to Texas, and ignore common-sense solutions and effective border-security policies.”
“I protested the proposed version of these rules back in October 2021, and, unsurprisingly, Biden found a way to make it worse, so I’m suing,” Paxton wrote. “The last thing Texas needs is for this Administration to make it easier for illegal aliens to enter the U.S. and obtain asylum through false claims and less oversight. We know what’s going to happen when the rule goes into effect in May 2022: wave upon wave of illegal aliens claiming ‘asylum.’ It’s true that our immigration system is extremely backlogged. But the answer is to secure the border, not overwhelm it even more by enacting cheap, easy incentives for illegal aliens to get into the United States.”
Less than a week ago, Paxton filed suit against Biden to stop the Title 42 border policy from ending May 23.
The Trump-era public health policy, officially called Title 42 authority and named for a 1944 public health law to prevent communicable disease, was put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19. It limits asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The policy went into effect under President Donald Trump in March 2020. Since then, migrants trying to enter the U.S. have been expelled more than 1.7 million times.