Refugee And Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services V. Trump – Preventing President Trump from Summarily Expelling Refugees Seeking Asylum

Federal laws guarantee noncitizens fleeing persecution and torture in other nations the opportunity to seek protection in the United States, if they arrive here. It prohibits the government from deporting individuals to places where they face persecution and torture. But President Trump has attempted to wipe away these laws by fiat.

On January 20, 2025, within hours of his inauguration, President Trump issued a Proclamation, “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” that declares “the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion.” The Proclamation, in effect, prevents anyone who crosses the southern border of the United States without a visa or without extensive medical information, criminal history records, and other background records, from even applying for asylum or withholding of removal. The Proclamation principally relies on Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) (the “INA”), which authorizes the President to “suspend the entry” of noncitizens when their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” But this authority to “suspend entry” does not empower the President to expel people who have already entered the United States, much less to do so in violation of the protections and procedures Congress provided elsewhere in the same statute.

We filed this lawsuit on February 3, 2025, together with the National ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, the National Immigrant Justice Center, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, and the Texas Civil Rights Project, on behalf of three nonprofit organizations that provide legal services to refugees seeking asylum. The case asks the court to prohibit the government from implementing this Trump proclamation.

On July 2, 2025, the district court ruled in our favor, concluding that the INA, by its terms, provides the sole and exclusive means for removing people already present in this country, and neither the INA nor the Constitution grants the President authority to limit the rights of non-citizens in the United States to apply for asylum. Nor does the Constitution grant the President authority to adopt an alternative immigration system.

The court certified the case as a class action on behalf of all individuals who are or will be present in the United States and subject to the Proclamation, issued a Declaratory Judgment that the Proclamation is unlawful insofar as it purports to suspend or restrict access to asylum or other statutory protections against removal to harm, and vacated the regulations that had been issued to implement the Proclamation.

The court deferred ruling regarding people who have already been removed from the United States because their claims implicate distinct questions of law, and because the relief they seek is different.

The same day, the government appealed and asked the court of appeals to stay the district court’s ruling. That request was fully briefed as of July 10, 2025, but has not yet been decided. The district court is awaiting the court of appeals’ action before addressing the claims of people who are not in the United States.