Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden’s administration, seeking the reinstatement of a Trump-era program that cut asylum fraud at the United States-Mexico border.
After taking office in January, Biden ended the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), which had proven remarkably effective in eliminating the Catch and Release policy whereby border crossers are apprehended and subsequently released into the U.S. interior while awaiting their asylum hearings.
Since then, illegal immigration at the southern border has skyrocketed by more than 240 percent compared to the same time last year, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released into the U.S. interior more than 6,400 of the 25,600 migrants enrolled in MPP thus far, Breitbart News exclusively reported.
In their lawsuit, Schmitt and Paxton call the Biden administration’s end to MPP an “arbitrary and capricious decision” that has led to “a huge surge of Central American migrants, including thousands of unaccompanied minors, passing through Mexico in order to advance meritless asylum claims at the U.S. border.”
The Biden administration, the lawsuit alleges, is violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), federal immigration law, a legally binding agreement between the federal government and Texas, and the U.S. Constitution.
The lawsuit states:
This migrant surge has inflicted serious costs on Texas as organized crime and drug cartels prey on migrant communities and children through human trafficking, violence, extortion, sexual assault, and exploitation. [Emphasis added]
…
With its intersection of major interstate highway routes, Missouri is a major destination and hub for human trafficking. Missouri’s ongoing fight against human trafficking — including the exploitation and trafficking of vulnerable migrants — likewise provides it with justiciable interests that fall within the zone of interests of federal statutes on immigration-related policy. Indeed, irresponsible border security policies that invite and encourage human traffickers to exploit vulnerable border crossing victims irreparably injure Missouri and other States. [Emphasis added]
Schmitt and Paxton are urging a federal judge to reverse Biden’s end to MPP, thus reinstating the program, by obtaining a preliminary and permanent injunction against the administration’s executive order.
“The blame for the current crisis at the Southern border should be laid squarely at the feet of President Biden and his administration,” Schmitt said in a statement.
“President Biden’s failure to control the massive influx of migrants — an influx invited by his lax policies — has opened the floodgates to human trafficking that will have lasting effects on Missouri and the United States and puts our nationally recognized efforts to fight human trafficking in jeopardy,” Schmitt said.
The case is the Texas v. the United States, No. 2:21-cv-00067-Z in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas Amarillo Division.
In a separate case, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has filed a lawsuit against DHS for allegedly violating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by halting border wall construction, ending MPP, and inflating the U.S. population with illegal immigration.
“It’s the pinnacle of hypocrisy for the Biden administration to claim it wants to protect our environment, while not enforcing federal statutes that are specifically designed for that purpose,” Brnovich said in a statement. “We’re not going to sit idly by as the Biden administration ignores real harms to our state resulting from its heavy-handed executive orders.”
The lawsuit seeks to declare that the administration has violated NEPA with its mass migration policies while preventing DHS officials from stopping border wall construction, releasing MPP migrants into the U.S. interior, and requiring the border to be secured in Arizona.
Brnovich’s lawsuit is Arizona v. Mayorkas, No. 2:21-cv-00617-DWL in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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