A Texas federal judge has again stopped a Biden administration attempt to end a Trump-era program forcing asylum-seekers back to Mexico.
Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas concluded on Thursday that an October 2021 memo from Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas explaining his reasons to end the so-called Remain in Mexico program did not meet legal requirements.
The judge, appointed by former President Donald Trump, concluded Mayorkas failed to consider in the memo the program’s “deterrent effect on illegal border crossings and the reduction on unmeritorious asylum claims.” He added that the government “abandoned statistic-based decisionmaking for intuitional decisionmaking.”
