With less than two weeks before President-elect Biden takes office, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration’s proposed asylum restrictions that would have overhauled the immigration system with restrictive new provisions. The new rule was to take effect on January 11.

While the granting of asylum has effectively ground to a halt under new health and safety-related pandemic rules, if the new rules had taken effect, they could have significantly limited post-COVID-19 immigration allowances and extended the definition of frivolous appeals.

Last June, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) published 43 pages of restrictive new rules in the Federal Register, seeking what they termed “streamlined proceedings” for judging asylum applications. Among other conditions, the new rules expanded the reasons asylum-seekers may be barred, including spending time in a third country before arriving in the United States.

Since the U.S. has been allowing only one in ten asylum-seekers to enter, under current DHS rules most had no choice but to spend time in Mexico or other Central American countries while awaiting a hearing. Judge James Donato of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California said the restriction “effectively establishes a presumption against asylum claims.”

The case, Pangea Legal Services II v. Barr, was filed by several immigrants’ rights organization plaintiffs who work on behalf of asylum seekers. Aaron Frankel, an attorney for plaintiffs, told the Associated Press (AP) that the Administration’s proposed rules were “nothing less than an attempt to end the asylum system.”

Judge Donato, like judges in five other district courts, invalidated the proposed rule because Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf was never confirmed and had leapfrogged over legitimate candidates for the position. He “was not a duly authorized Acting Secretary, and that his actions were a legal nullity,” he said. Wolf resigned on January 11.

In a strongly-worded reprimand, Donato said that DHS had, “recycled exactly the same legal and factual claims made in the prior cases, as if they had not been soundly rejected in well-reasoned opinions by several courts… This is a troubling litigation strategy. In effect, the government keeps crashing the same car into a gate, hoping that someday it might break through.”

In his ruling, the judge reiterated the “long and complicated history and …enormous body of statutory and case law” justifying asylum. He noted that it is designed to protect refugees, or those who cannot return to their home countries “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

Plaintiffs feared that protections on the basis of gender or those who claim they were targeted by gangs, rogue government officials or “nonstate organizations” would probably not be eligible for asylum if the new rules were enacted. Court hearings would also be limited and immigration judges would be directed to be more selective.

Donato also sided with plaintiffs who met the standards that require the party seeking an injunction to both “demonstrate a fair chance of success on the merits,” and “demonstrate irreparable harm.” Plaintiffs were Harvard Law School’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, the Immigrant Defense Project of New York, the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild of Washington, D.C., and the law firm of Sidley Austin.

They had argued that their mission of providing legal services to at-risk clients seeking asylum from persecution or violence would be harmed by the cumbersome new rules. Future representation would require extra time and force them to take fewer cases, which would impair their funding stream which is linked to the number of asylum applications they file.

“This is the most far-reaching of the midnight asylum regulations unveiled in the Trump administration’s final days,” Sabrineh Ardalan, Director of the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program told UC Hastings News. “But try as it may, this administration cannot destroy our asylum system and rewrite our laws by executive fiat. We are confident that this rule will ultimately be struck down for good.”

Donato noted that “There is a strong public interest in ensuring that the laws duly enacted by elected representatives are not undermined by agency actions.”

The judge also discussed the need for a one uniform rule across the country, writing, “A nationwide injunction is particularly appropriate in cases implicating immigration policy uniform relief. That presumption applies with full force here. Enjoining enforcement of the Rule in only part of the country or against only particular parties would result in a fragmented and disjointed patchwork of immigration policy.”

It is not known whether the Administration will appeal. Biden recently told the AP that his administration would need “probably the next six months” to re-create a system that can process asylum seekers to prevent a flood of migrants from arriving at the southern border.