Attorney General Alan Wilson sues Biden Administration over unlawful open-border policies

June 2, 2023

Along with 17 other states, Attorney General Alan Wilson sued the Biden Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for its Circumvention of Lawful Pathways rule, that would incentivize immigrants to make false asylum claims and enter the country illegally.

“The Biden Administration has made it clear it doesn’t care about securing the southern border and that it will ignore the rule of law to keep it open,” said Attorney General Alan Wilson. “The latest rule rewards those making false asylum claims by granting them entry into our country. This is not the first time the Biden Administration has taken matters into its own hands to change a law passed by Congress. I don’t anticipate it being the last time, but we’ll be ready to defend the rule of law and secure our border because in Joe Biden’s America, every state is a border state.”

The complaint argues “the Circumvention Rule euphemistically characterizes the current once-in-a-century border crisis whereby millions of aliens have illegally crossed the border, flooded American communities, and stretched to the breaking point state and local social services and education systems, as merely ‘a substantial increase in migration.’ 88 Fed. Reg. at 31,341. Strikingly, the Circumvention Rule fails to acknowledge the root cause of the crisis: the Administration’s reckless open borders policies. And rather than address that root cause, the Circumvention Rule is little more than an academic exercise that tries to define the problem away by re-characterizing illegal crossings as ‘lawful pathways.'”

The federal government has characterized the new rule as a means for continuing to regulate immigration since the expiration of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Title 42 public health order. That policy gave authorities greater ability to bar illegal immigrants from crossing the border during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In reality, however, the new rule just worsens the problem by redefining previously illegal border crossings as “lawful pathways.”

Attorney General Wilson joins Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming in the multistate suit.

You can read the complaint here.