The American Civil Liberties Union has officially filed a lawsuit in response to Trump signing a proclamation banning entry into the United States from the Mexico border, Buzzfeed News is reporting. Under this new regulation, anyone entering the country illegally will be forced to endure the expedited deportation proceedings and automatically refused the asylum process. According to USA Today , asylum can be defined as “a form of protection granted to people who fear persecution in their home countries based on their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or their political opinion.”
The Immigration and Nationality Act states that anyone who attempts to enter the country — whether legally or not — has the ability to apply for asylum. This act dates all the way back to 1965. The ACLU is arguing that the new presidential order that Trump signed on Friday, November 9, violates this act. Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, says what Trump is attempting to do is completely against the law.
“The president can’t on his own change the asylum law and that’s what he’s trying to do here,” said Jadwat. “It is not just illegal but immoral in the sense that he’s trying to cut back on protections we provide people who are fleeing persecution in their countries of origin.”
BREAKING: We just filed a lawsuit to challenge the president’s new asylum ban.
Neither the president nor his cabinet can override the clear commands of our law, but that’s exactly what they’re trying to do. We’ll see him in court.
— ACLU (@ACLU) November 9, 2018
In addition to violating the Immigration and Nationality Act, the ACLU also claimed that Trump and his administration did not properly go through the process of making drastic changes such as this, and instead rushed through the system and skipped mandatory parts of the procedure. The law regarding the process of the executive branch issuing regulations has been in effect since 1946. The Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice said in a joint statement on Friday that Trump does have the right to ban people from asylum.
“The fact that the ACLU and its partners would go to court to specifically sue for the right for aliens to enter the country illegally is demonstrative of the open border community’s disdain for our nation’s laws that almost all rational Americans find appalling,” they said. “The President has the right to suspend the entry of aliens if he determines it to be in the national interest — and that is what President Trump has done.”
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in San Francisco to attempt to block the policy, which is set to go into effect at 12:01 a.m. ET on November 10.
