We’ve noted here how court decisions have curtailed the ability of local governments to control homelessness (by voiding local no-camping-on-the-streets ordinances) and other measures, and likewise the judiciary has limited what the federal and state governments can do to limit illegal immigration.
Today a federal district court judge in Oakland, CA, struck down the Biden Administration’s already weak enforcement of asylum rules that required someone seeking asylum to apply first in a foreign country:
Judge Jon Tigar of the California Northern District Court previously ruled against a similar policy under the Trump administration . . . Tigar’s ruling stems from a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union among other immigrant rights groups over a new asylum rule that largely bars migrants who passed through another country from seeking asylum in the United States, marking a departure from decades-long protocol.
The Biden policy, like the Trump-era one, garnered wide condemnation from Biden allies, including Democratic lawmakers and immigrant advocates when it was rolled out.
Who is Judge Jon Tigar? Let’s start with the fact that he is an Obama appointee to the federal bench. Then take in some of his other rulings (from Wikipedia) since becoming a judge:
On April 2, 2015, Tigar ordered the California Department of Corrections (“CDCR”) to provide gender reassignment surgery to a transgender inmate, finding that such surgery was the only adequate medical treatment for the inmate’s gender dysphoria.
Since August 2017, Tigar has presided over Plata v. Newsom, a case concerning the constitutional adequacy of medical care in the California state prison system. On September 27, 2021, Tigar ordered that all CDCR staff, including medical and custody staff, be vaccinated against COVID-19, subject to medical and religious exemption. . .
On November, 2020, Tigar issued an order enjoining the California Department of Motor Vehicles from enforcing a ban on personalized license plate configurations it found “offensive to good taste and decency” on the grounds that the regulation violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. . .
On July 24, 2019, Tigar issued a nationwide injunction that barred the Trump administration from denying asylum to persons who crossed through but did not apply for asylum in a third country.[17] In August, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found the administration’s asylum policy “likely violated federal regulatory law” but narrowed Tigar’s injunction to apply only within the Ninth Circuit. On September 9, 2019, Tigar reinstated the nationwide scope of the injunction.
A reminder that for all the talk from the left about an “activist” conservative Supreme Court, left-wing judicial activism is still alive and well.
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