A judge on Monday ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to let approximately 12,000 refugees into the United States, dealing a setback to the government’s efforts to overhaul America’s immigration policy.
The decision underscores the boundaries imposed by an appeals court rule, which permitted the Trump administration to pause the refugee admissions system but required it to admit persons who had already been awarded refugee status and planned to travel to the United States.
The Trump administration argued at a hearing last week that it should only have to admit 160 refugees who were slated to travel within two weeks of an executive order in January stopping the system.
However, US District Judge Jamal Whitehead overruled the claim on Monday, stating that “the government’s interpretation is, to put it mildly, ‘interpretivey-pokery’ of the highest order.”
“It requires not just reading between the lines” of the appeal decision “but hallucinating new text that simply is not there,” Whitehead wrote in his order.
Whitehead had already barred Trump’s executive order to halt refugee admissions, declaring in February that it likely violated the 1980 Refugee Act.
A month later, however, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his decision.
“Had the Ninth Circuit intended to impose a two-week limitation — one that would reduce the protected population from about 12,000 to 160 individuals — it would have done so explicitly,” Whitehead wrote.
“This Court will not entertain the government’s result-orientated rewriting of a judicial order that clearly says what it says,” he added.
The petition had been brought by Jewish refugee non-profit HIAS, Christian group Church World Service, Lutheran Community Services Northwest, and a number of individuals.
Those nonprofits stated in their February lawsuit that several people who had been about to travel, having sold all their belongings in their own country, were abruptly left in limbo by Trump’s order.
Refugee resettlement was one of the few legal paths to eventual US citizenship, and former President Joe Biden welcomed it, expanding eligibility to include those afflicted by climate change.
Trump’s White House campaign was defined by hatred regarding immigrants.
He has also spearheaded an aggressive deportation effort, with widely publicised military planes transporting handcuffed individuals to Latin American countries.
