Immigration Advocates Call Texas Block on Deportation ‘Irrational and Inhumane’

Just a couple of days after President Biden issued his 100-day pause on deportations, a Texas judge has blocked the moratorium.

Texas isn’t allowing President Joe Biden to move ahead with his 100-day pause on deportations. Trump-appointed US District Judge Drew Tipton has blocked Biden’s 100-day deportation moratorium citing that the administration has failed “to provide any concrete, reasonable justification for a 100-day pause on deportations.” The president is expected to appeal the ruling. 

Tipton isn’t the only one that has an issue with Biden’s 100-day pause on deportations—a key priority for the president’s move toward immigration reform. The block by Tipton comes after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton threatened to sue the Biden administration on Jan. 22. 

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Paxton, who also filed a lawsuit to block the results of the 2020 presidential election, argued that the moratorium violated federal law as well as an agreement Texas signed with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) late in the Trump administration. That agreement required DHS to consult with Texas and other states before taking any action to “reduce, redirect, reprioritize, relax, or in any way modify immigration enforcement.”

Immigration advocates spoke out against the deportation block from Texas saying that both Tipton and Paxton are continuing to push forward Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. 

Marisa Franco, national director for Mijente, said in a statement that “Judge Tipton’s decision to block the nationwide deportation moratorium will be remembered as one of the last gasps of the Trump Administration’s racist, xenophobic legacy.”

Franco added, “Texas cannot and will not dictate the federal immigration policy—especially when that policy wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on the criminalization of immigrants, dehumanized vulnerable migrants, and swelled already-overcrowded jails and prisons. We are confident that the Biden administration will exercise its full power to defend the legality of the memorandum and undo the damage that President Trump has done to our immigrant community and our national character.”

Fernando García, executive director of Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR), also said in a statement to The Americano that they “strongly condemn” Tipton’s decision. García calls the ruling “irrational and inhumane.”

“It is also revealing that this federal Judge decided to align with Texas General Attorney Ken Paxton, the same person who attempted to eliminate the DACA program that protects young, undocumented Americans from deportation,” García said. 

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The Biden administration argued in court filings that the agreement is unenforceable because “an outgoing administration cannot contract away that power for an incoming administration.”