Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is suing the Biden administration over its decision to drop the Trump-era "remain in Mexico" program, told Newsmax Friday that his legal action calls for the courts to rule there must be a deadline for bringing back the procedure after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it had to be re-implemented.
The program, which requires certain people to return to Mexico to wait for their U.S. asylum hearings to take place, was a "tremendous success" and reduced illegal immigration under former President Donald Trump, Paxton said on Newsmax's "National Report."
However, the Biden administration stopped the practice, and Texas officials then sued the administration to restore the policy.
"We got an order from a district court, which was upheld by the Supreme Court that the administration had to re-implement the stay in Mexico program, which stopped this loophole where people come and claim asylum and then they just them loose in the country," said Paxton.
"After the last month of inaction by the Biden administration, we sued them again yesterday saying, 'Hey, you have not re-implemented the program.' So now we want some type of deadline from the courts, and we're asking for some type of investigation, at least some type of discovery, that we can do to understand what the Biden administration is doing."
Meanwhile, the situation at the border at the Del Rio bridge has been "devastating," and Paxton said there is "no way" that most of the Haitian immigrants that gathered there have been flown back to Haiti, as the administration claims.
"They didn't like the optics, apparently, of all those people on the border," said Paxton. "It was making the administration look bad, so now they're just let them go ... they're just being released and driven up to San Antonio, into our state and released into the cities, so who knows where they're going?
"Who knows whether they have COVID? Who knows what their background is? They haven't been vetted. This is the policy of this administration, which is completely illegal and very harmful to our country and my state."
Paxton on Friday also slammed President Joe Biden for his comments that there will be an investigation of the Border Patrol's horse units and their actions while dealing with the Haitian migrants, and that there will be consequences.
"I've been on the border a lot more than he has and I feel very bad for the border agents that are trying to do their jobs but are not being allowed to do their jobs," said Paxton. "When they do try to do their jobs, they end up being criticized ... I feel very bad for the border agents who are being criticized for simply trying to do their job in very difficult circumstances that the president has created."
Biden also on Friday blamed former President Donald Trump for much of the woes his administration has faced in his first year, including on immigration, but Paxton pointed out that it's "hard to understand" considering how quickly Biden moved to change Trump's policies.
"If you look at the numbers from a year ago, illegal immigration is up like over 300% a month, so it's not Donald Trump's fault," said Paxton. "He made tremendous progress in reducing those numbers."
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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