In a blistering critique, a federal judge late Saturday denied the Biden Justice Department’s request to stay a temporary restraining order blocking the release of illegal immigrants into the United States without court dates.
U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell II, a Trump appointee in Florida, called the Biden administration’s request for an emergency stay “borderline frivolous” and “Chicken Little.”
The ruling left the DOJ to seek relief from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, a move which earlier in the day officials said they were prepared to do.
The judge said the administration had no basis to release migrants into the country’s interior without a court date now that the Trump-era Title 42 policy had expired.
“DHS’s Chicken Little arguments about the impact of it not being able to (mis)use ‘parole’ under either policy as a processing tool for the surge of aliens arriving at the border are hard to square with the DHS Secretary’s recent comments that only ‘a fraction of the people that we encounter’ would be paroled into the country and that ‘the vast majority will be addressed in our border patrol facilities and our ICE detention facilities,’" Wetherell wrote
Earlier in the day, the Biden Justice Department had sought an emergency order allowing it to continue releasing illegal aliens into the United States.
DOJ attorneys had asked Wetherell for a two-week restraining order on the Biden administration policy.
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