The Class Action Coup: How a Clinton Judge Just Declared War on Trump’s Border Crackdown

The ruling today by Judge Moss is relatively simple — in a complex way.

I haven’t studied it enough yet to be settled on all the details, but here seems to be the rub:

By statute under the Immigration and Nationality Act, anyone inside the U.S. can apply for Asylum, regardless of how they got here.

The Admin. problem is that Joe Biden and the Democrats allowed 10+ million to come into the US. That statute now applies to all of them.

The Admin. issued an EO suspending Asylum claims. It can suspend ADMISSIONS by refugees who claim asylum — they are outside the US.

But for people INSIDE, the statute doesn’t give him that authority.

This is the very reason behind the “Remain in Mexico” policy from his first administration. Force asylum seekers to remain outside the US until their asylum claim is determined.

But Biden allowed them in, and now there is a process in the INA for how you get them out. Once in, they get to ask for Asylum — but 99% of asylum claims are denied because “economic migrants” don’t qualify. You can’t ask for asylum on the basis that you will have a better quality of life in the US.

This goes back to the foundational problem — the Biden Admin and Democrats knew the playbook to crippling the deportation system was simply to overwhelm it with numbers it could never deal with.

So that is what they did.

But Alito and Thomas warned courts should not use class actions as a “loophole” to circumvent the majority’s restriction on universal injunctions, ensuring that any class action relief is narrowly tailored to the *certified* class, correct?

— Cap'n (@MunsterPop) July 3, 2025

And I think what Moss has done today is to demonstrate that very issue.

He has declared a “class” with literally millions of members.

I think it gets set aside.

In looking again at Judge Moss’s order yesterday, particularly the class, it is not quite so broad as the commentary here on X would suggest.

As noted yesterday, the issue is the suspension by an EO of the statutory right to make a claim of asylum by illegal aliens already in the US, or by future illegal aliens who enter the US.

The EO declared that the flood of aliens allowed in by the Biden Admin was an “invasion” warranting drastic alterations to the process by which aliens are removed from the country under the INA. One of those alterations — as included in guidance sent to Border Patrol and ICE — was not not allow asylum claims to be made as part of a newly enhanced “expedited removal” put in place informally to allow for the faster repatriation across the Mexico border of illegals who came in that way.

In his Order granting a class, Judge Moss extended the class to all persons subject to the EO.

For the most part — there are a couple of small wrinkles — that is anyone who would be entitled to claim asylum but would be denied the ability to do so under the new “expedited removal” process that didn’t include an asylum application.

One thing not covered in the Judge Moss’s Order, and thus not mentioned in any of the media coverage, is that there is a hard deadline of applying for asylum of 1 year from the date of entry.

The time limit is in 8 USC 1151(a)(2)(B):

“[Asylum] shall not apply to an alien unless the alien demonstrates by clear and convincing evidence that the application has been filed within 1 year after the date of the alien’s arrival in the United States.”

The Proclamation — and therefore the Class Action — includes more than just asylum claims. But that is the law as it exists — someone in the US being deported can ask to not be sent back to their home country.

But as for a class of asylum seekers, that is still going to be limited to persons in the country a year or less when they seek asylum because if they aren’t entitled to it by statute, they can’t get it by class action so they are not a proper member of the class.

This class will get appealed, and I suspect Judge Moss is going to be told this is a difficulty — you can’t have a class where people cycle in and out based on an ever changing variable to changes who is in and who is out of the class.