If Biden Can’t Get Congress To Open The Borders, He’ll Likely Do It Himself – By John Daniel Davidson (The Federalist) / January 28 2021
It seems what Democrats cannot accomplish in Congress, they will simply declare as law when they gain control of the White House.
Yesterday, a federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s brazen attempt to freeze all deportations for 100 days. Joe Biden had promised during the campaign that if elected he would declare a “moratorium” on deportations a part of a broader effort to roll back nearly all of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But it turns out there are limits to what even a Democratic president can do by executive decree.
Stated in plain terms, the problem with Biden’s attempted deportation freeze is that it violates federal law. A lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton rightly argues the Biden administration is bound by federal immigration law and cannot simply change it by administrative fiat. At the very least, executive branch agencies must follow something called the Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, which sets forth certain standards and processes for how federal agencies must enact major changes like the one Biden proposed.
You might recall that the APA played a role in thwarting the Trump administration’s attempt to rescind Deferred Action Against Child Arrivals (DACA) last year when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that the administration had not followed the APA in issuing an order to end the program. But there’s a big difference between how the APA got in the way of Biden’s deportation freeze and how it got in the way of Trump’s cancellation of DACA.
