The reason the order is important is that it unmasks the deep cruelty and bad faith at the core of Trump’s immigration agenda in a particularly striking way: The judge flatly declares that the administration must know, based on the available empirical data, that the policy would put untold migrants at serious risk.

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The administration knows this, the judge suggests -- yet went ahead with the policy anyway.

The order, by U.S. District Judge Jon S. Tigar in San Francisco, temporarily blocked a new administration rule that renders migrants ineligible for asylum if they don’t first apply for asylum in a country they pass through on the way to the United States, with narrow exceptions.

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This means migrants fleeing Honduras or El Salvador would have to apply in Mexico or Guatemala, and migrants fleeing Guatemala would have to apply in Mexico. In practice, most will apply in Mexico.

This is an extreme move. Under current law, any person on U.S. soil — including undocumented immigrants who just crossed or were detained in the interior — who requests asylum or expresses fear of persecution if returned must be granted an asylum interview.

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The new policy would effectively end this commitment — and with it the broader commitment, enshrined in international human rights documents and in U.S. law, to the principle that anyone fleeing in desperation to U.S. soil is entitled to appeal for refuge and get a fair hearing.

The order concludes that the policy flouts the law as intended by Congress. Officials had argued that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) allows the administration to set “conditions” on eligibility for asylum. The “condition” here was that migrants must first apply for asylum in another country, and be denied.

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But the law also requires that those conditions must be consistent with statute. And the judge blocked the policy, concluding that the challengers, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, have a good chance of winning on the merits.

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The judge agreed with the challengers’ argument that the new rule is inconsistent with the law. The INA expressly denotes only two scenarios in which asylum can be denied on the basis of having passed through another country: when the United States has a “safe third country” agreement with that country or when the asylum seeker is already “firmly resettled” there.

The vast majority of asylum seekers won’t meet those conditions, because we don’t have such an agreement with Guatemala or Mexico, and since they won’t be firmly resettled in either. The order concluded the new regulation is inconsistent with the statute on that basis.

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More cruelty and bad faith

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But here’s the striking thing. The order also concludes that the regulation is unjustified, based on the administration’s failure to show that safely applying for and getting asylum in Mexico is even feasible. This flouts the will of Congress, which made ineligibility for asylum contingent only on migrants actually having a real and safe third-country option.

The order notes that the administration’s efforts to illustrate this is feasible failed on the facts, concluding that the totality of the empirical evidence shows precisely the opposite:

The bulk of the administrative record consists of human rights organizations documenting in exhaustive detail the ways in which those seeking asylum in Mexico are (1) subject to violence and abuse from third parties and government officials, (2) denied their rights under Mexican and international law, and (3) wrongly returned to countries from which they fled persecution. Yet, even though this mountain of evidence points one way, the agencies went the other.

Immigration lawyer David Leopold argued to me that, in effect, the judge is saying the administration is trying to pursue a policy in the full affirmative knowledge that it would “put asylum seekers in harm’s way.”

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“This is ironic, considering that the president is charged with upholding the law that protects refugees in need of safe haven,” Leopold told me. “We seem to have come to a point where asylum seekers must hope that a federal judge protects them from this White House.”

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This might be the most clear-cut illustration yet that Trump’s real agenda is to reduce the number of asylum seekers and refugees who end up gaining protected status here, even or especially among those who legitimately qualify for it, no matter what the consequences for them.

This latest is part of a broader pattern, in which Trump and immigration adviser Stephen Miller have pursued this agenda even when the facts point the other way or when the consequences are known to be potentially horrible.

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It remains to be seen whether the block on this latest horror will be sustained. But the cruelty and badfaith at the core of this policy are really something to behold, which is quite an achievement, given how deeply saturated Trump’s broader immigration agenda is in both.

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