Last weekend, Karen wrote about yet another executive order from President Biden, this one placing a freeze on nearly all deportations for 100 days. Open Borders Joe was sending yet another clear signal to the progressive base that he was on board with most of their worst instincts, particularly when it comes to border security and illegal immigration. That move prompted some harsh blowback, particularly from Marco Rubio, who asked why illegal alien rapists were being allowed to remain in our country.

Biden’s plan may not get off the ground, however. With amazing rapidity, a court in Texas took up a challenge to the order. The result was a 14-day injunction on the order issued by a U.S. District Judge in the Lone Star State. Gee… I wonder where they got the idea to hold up a president’s executive orders by challenging them in court? (Business Insider)

A federal judge in Texas temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s 100-day deportation moratorium on Tuesday, stalling the administration’s early immigration reform goals.

The freeze, an executive order signed by President Biden alongside a stack of other first-day executive orders, was blocked by US District Judge Drew B. Tipton of the Southern District of Texas…

Tipton argued that Texas had proven, “that it pays millions of dollars annually to provide social services and uncompensated healthcare expenses and other state-provided benefits to illegal aliens such as the Emergency Medicaid program, the Family Violence Program, and the Texas Children’s Health Insurance Program.”

Democrats and progressive groups around the country created something of a cottage industry out of challenging Donald Trump’s executive orders, usually in the Ninth Circuit, and bogging them down while the challenges and appeals played out in the courts. Now, perhaps using those obstructionist strategies as a blueprint, the same thing is happening to Biden’s executive orders in the first week of his administration.

Making this all the more hilarious is the fact that Judge Tipton was appointed by Donald Trump, one of the hundreds of such conservative placements around the country ushered in by Cocaine Mitch and the President. Given how many seats were filled over the past four years, don’t be surprised if you see a lot more rulings like this one going forward.

With all of that said, I’m really not sure how strong Texas’ case is here and how this injunction will hold up on appeal. Biden is the one setting policy on immigration now, as alarming as such a prospect might be. With his own people taking over at the top of DHS and other immigration enforcement agencies, they’ll probably wind up with plenty of prosecutorial discretion at their disposal in such matters. Granted, Trump’s hand was probably stronger in the sense that he was trying to uphold existing immigration law where Biden is looking to allow people to subvert it. But that may not wind up mattering in the end.

Even if the judge’s order were to hold up, all that would mean is that a “blanket ban” on deportations wouldn’t be allowed. But each pending deportation case can still be examined on an individual basis. With Biden’s people being the ones doing the examining, couldn’t they simply find against the deportation orders for most, if not all of them? The end result would be the same, though Joe Biden would miss out on the ability to claim some sort of progressive mantle of victory for having fully terminated our agencies’ law enforcement efforts in this regard.

President Biden’s dreams of a sweeping immigration reform bill making it to his desk are already falling apart. Even members of his own party in Congress have been warning that a huge bill including full amnesty for illegal aliens isn’t attracting much bipartisan support and their expectations should be a bit more “modest.” But given how much Donald Trump was able to accomplish in four years through nothing but executive orders and administrative policy changes, I have an uneasy feeling that Biden will eventually be able to reverse much of that progress via the pen and the phone.