A federal court in California is hearing arguments Wednesday in yet another challenge to President Biden’s immigration rules, this one from critics on the left who say it endangers migrants attempting to enter America at the border.

The challenge comes from a group of immigrant rights groups in California who claim the rules violate laws on the books that allow anyone to apply for asylum on arrival to America. They are seeking to block new rules that went into place May 11 with the expiration of the Covid-era restrictions, known as Title 42, rules that make it much more difficult for refugees to apply for asylum at the border unless they use a new online application system.

“The rule is already inflicting untold suffering on thousands of asylum seekers, who are either being deported to persecution or stranded in Mexican states where migrants face horrific and pervasive violence,” the groups have argued in court filings.

The hearing comes one day after the Border Patrol released new data on migrants encountered at the southern border, showing what the administration says is a “significant and continuing decline” in the number of migrants trying to cross the border illegally. For the month of June, the first full month since the lifting of Title 42 restrictions, agents intercepted just less than 100,000 migrants at the border, a 42 percent drop from the previous month and the lowest number since February 2021.

“Our sustained efforts to enforce consequences under our longstanding Title 8 authorities, combined with expanding access to lawful pathways and processes, have driven the number of migrant encounters along the Southwest border to their lowest levels in more than two years,” a Customs and Border Protection official, Troy Miller, said.

Critics of the administration’s policy say the declining number of illegals at the border is part of an elaborate shell game being played with the American public by Mr. Biden’s Department of Homeland Security. The numbers are declining, they say, because the administration has thrown open new legal pathways — primarily via a new online application called CBP One — that are allowing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to enter America by other means.

“Encounters of illegal migrants by the Border Patrol at the Southwest Border were down in June, but only because the Biden administration has invented other means of allowing large numbers of inadmissible aliens to enter the country,” the president of the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform, Dan Stein, said. “When it comes to illegal immigration, the Biden administration’s strategy is to make it less visible to the American public, not to rein in the unprecedented flow of migrants.”

New reporting by CBS News, citing unpublished government data, appears to back up that criticism. The report says the Biden administration has allowed more than half a million migrants into the country in the last two years under a parole authority dating to the 1950s, a figure that, if accurate, would mark the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern American history. The administration has done so without authority from Congress, which hasn’t changed the levels of legal immigration allowed since 1990.

The report says a total of 541,000 migrants have been allowed into the country under the parole authority, about half of them from Ukraine and Afghanistan and the remainder from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and other Latin American nations. A former immigration commissioner during the 1990s, Doris Meissner, described the Biden administration’s actions as historic.

“At this scale, in this time period, it is unprecedented,” Ms. Meissner tells CBS.
Republican officials in Texas have also sued to block Mr. Biden’s new border rules, alleging that the policy is “inviting tens of thousands of aliens into Texas” and runs afoul of the laws Congress has passed to regulate immigration.