A migrant seeking asylum holds up the CBP One app showing his appointment was canceled after President Donald Trump was sworn into office, Jan. 20, 2025, in Matamoros, Mexico. A federal judge Wednesday struck down Trump’s suspension of asylums at the southern border.

Eric Gay/AP

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Eric Gay/AP

A federal judge in Washington, D.C. ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration cannot deny entry to people crossing the southern border to apply for asylum. The court found that neither the constitution nor federal immigration law allow the president to make that decision.

The proclamation to deny entry to asylum seekers at the southern border was issued by President Trump on his first day in office.

Asylum has been part of U.S. law since 1980, allowing those who fear for their safety to seek refuge in the U.S. as long as they can show a credible fear of persecution in their home country. In the past, other U.S. presidents had attempted to make asylum seeking more difficult, but the scope of Trump’s order was unprecedented.

“This is a flat-out ban on all asylum,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project told NPR in January. “This is way beyond anything that even President Trump has tried in the past.”

Several immigrant rights advocacy groups filed a lawsuit to halt the policy in February, including the ACLU, the Texas Civil Rights Project, and the National Immigrant Justice Center. They argued that the proclamation endangered thousands of lives of those fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries.

In his 128-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss wrote that “The President cannot adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted.”

Immigrant rights groups took issue with the president’s repeated characterization of the situation at the southern border as an “invasion.”

The ruling will take effect in two weeks, and the Trump administration is expected to appeal. In a post on X, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller blasted the decision: “a marxist judge has declared that all potential FUTURE illegal aliens on foreign soil (eg a large portion of planet earth) are part of a protected global ‘class’ entitled to admission into the United States.”