U.S. Department of Justice

Trump administration lawyers claim that immigration advocacy groups lack standing to sue to block recent changes to asylum policy.

Last week, nonprofit groups sued the Trump administration following a proclamation from President Donald Trump and an interim final rule from acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen barring asylum for people crossing the southern U.S. border outside of designated ports of entry.

In a brief submitted opposing the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, government officials, including Assistant Attorney General Joseph Harold Hunt and U.S. Department of Justice Office of Immigration Litigation assistant director Erez Reuveni, claim that the changes were made lawfully.

Government lawyers said the plaintiffs could not claim injury over the challenges of adapting to a new policy because “that view of injury would confer standing whenever the law changed, converting the courts from a branch that decides cases and controversies to an oversight board reviewing any shift in the law.” They also wrote that claims of injury to nonprofit funding were too speculative.

The government lawyers also stated that while plaintiffs East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, Al Otro Lado, Innovation Law Lab, and the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles objected to the categorical bar of asylum for certain migrants, “the Executive may create categorical rules barring asylum eligibility and may deny individual aliens asylum based on their unlawful entry.”

The brief also stated the rule “does not turn on an alien's unlawful entry per se, but rather on his decision to enter at a particular place and time in violation of a presidential proclamation” which is within the president's authority.

In the lawsuit filed Nov. 9, plaintiffs, represented by American Civil Liberties Union, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Center for Constitutional Rights, said the new restrictions on asylum violate the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

“President Trump's new asylum ban is illegal. Neither the president nor his cabinet secretaries can override the clear commands of U.S. law, but that's exactly what they're trying to do,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, in a press release Friday. “This action undermines the rule of law and is a great moral failure because it tries to take away protections from individuals facing persecution—it's the opposite of what America should stand for.”

The ACLU had no immediate additional comment.

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