Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen and 13 other states are suing the Biden administration over yet another unlawful immigration rule that will make the crisis at the southern border worse than it already is. The new rule violates federal laws and bypasses Congress and erodes asylum integrity safeguards.

The Asylum Rule largely removes federal immigration judges from the review process and instead gives employees within the Department of Homeland Security unprecedented authority to grant asylum to migrants outright.

“President Biden seems intent on erasing any semblance of control at our southern border, unleashing one disastrous and dangerous immigration policy after another,” Attorney General Knudsen said. “Continually incentivizing illegal immigration, as he has done time and again, makes it easier for cartels to smuggle drugs across the border and up to states like Montana.”

The Biden administration published its Asylum Rule in late March. It applies to new arrivals at U.S. borders who are making asylum claims. Federal law requires that immigration judges within the U.S. Department of Justice make the final determinations for migrants’ asylum claims.

However, under the new Asylum Rule, that power would be largely transferred to DHS asylum officers – a direct violation of federal law. This would eliminate immigration judges from the review process in most cases and replace them with individuals who are more susceptible to political control within an administration. Given the Biden administration’s blind-eye turned toward immigration laws, this would almost guarantee an increase in the rate of false asylum claims granted.

Additionally, Biden’s Asylum Rule violates the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1101, the Homeland Security Act, and the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

The Biden administration did not follow the Administrative Procedure Act when promulgating the Asylum Rule, offering arbitrary and capricious reasoning and changing the final rule so completely from the proposed rule as to deny the public a meaningful chance to comment on it before issuance. By the Biden administration’s own count, those changes include at least 23 significant amendments and are so significant that they take more than 3,100 words just to summarize.

The Biden administration failed to analyze the interaction between the Asylum Rule and its proposed termination of Title 42, which will cause a massive increase in illegal immigration and non-meritorious asylum claims. The Asylum Rule would go into effect merely eight days after the Biden administration’s proposed Title 42 end date, causing a further increase in illegal border crossings.

Last month, 210,000 migrants were arrested at the border, the highest monthly total in two decades and a 24 percent increase over March 2021. These border crossings overwhelm border patrol agents and detract from their drug interdiction activities.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana. Joining Attorney General Knudsen are the attorneys general of Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Click here to read a copy of the complaint.

Earlier this week, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order, which prevents for 14 days the Biden administration from moving ahead with its proposal to end Title 42.