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Dec. 16 (UPI) -- A U.S. district judge on Thursday again put the brakes on the Biden administration's plans to end the Trump era "Remain in Mexico" immigration policy, issuing a stay until legal wrangling continues. The 2019 policy forces asylum-seekers who cross the Mexico-U.S. border, regardless of what country they come from, to stay in Mexico until their claims can be heard in court. More than 70,000 have been sent to Mexico under the plan, something Biden had vowed to end.
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The case is currently facing a legal ping-pong match, with federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, siding with legal action filed by Texas and Missouri that argued the White House's action to end the policy was illegally "arbitrary and capricious."
The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote in June, said Biden could end the policy but sent it back to Kacsmaryk for additional proceedings. On Thursday, Kacsmaryk sided with Texas again, saying it met all the requirements for a preliminary injunction.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the judge's ruling on Twitter.
"I sued Biden nearly two years ago to keep Remain-in-Mexico," Paxton wrote. "The administration played games all the way to SCOTUS, but tonight Texas and USA win. I just secured an order from a federal court ordering Biden not to scrap the program. Biden's open-border agenda won't survive my legal attacks."
In August, the Department of Homeland Security moved to end the Remain in Mexico policy, officially called the Migrant Protections Protocols, after the Supreme Court ruling.
"DHS is committed to ending the court-ordered implementation of MPP in a quick, and orderly, manner," DHS had said in a statement then. "As Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas has said, MPP has endemic flaws, imposes unjustifiable human costs and pulls resources and personnel away from other priority efforts to secure our border."
