The Trump-era immigration policy allowing the expulsion of asylum seekers at America’s southern border will stay in place at least until next month, a federal judge has ruled.

As the Biden administration fights related cases in the courts, and while the president struggles to develop a coherent immigration policy, the Senate majority leader, Charles Schumer, said that Democrats are working on legislation that would regulate the status of undocumented immigrants currently in the country. 

Mr. Schumer’s legislation, which could be voted on during Congress’s lame-duck session, would normalize the citizenship status of recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. 

“The election is over,” Mr. Schumer told a group of immigrant advocates and reporters. “American sent a clear message. They rejected the deeply anti-immigrant message of the MAGA Republicans.” The DACA program allows hundreds of thousands of qualified undocumented immigrants to receive work permits and protection from immigration authorities. 

At Washington, a district judge, Emmet Sullivan, put on hold a ruling on the Trump-era policy known as Title 42, which was enacted in 2020 at the height of the Covid pandemic. The Trump administration tried to shut down the border as a measure to stop the spread of the disease. 

While President Biden has criticized President Trump’s border policies as anti-immigrant, he maintained Title 42 under the guise of Covid emergency, even as the pandemic has eased across America. 

On Tuesday, Judge Sullivan ordered Mr. Biden to lift Title 42, calling the policy “arbitrary and capricious.” The judge also faulted the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for supporting the policy. 

Hours after the order was issued the Department of Justice requested a five-week hold on the ruling, to give it time to prepare for the transition.

“This transition period is critical to ensuring that the Department of Homeland Security can continue to carry out its mission to secure the nation’s borders and to conduct its border operations in an orderly fashion,” government attorneys said. On Wednesday, Judge Sullivan granted the hold “with great reluctance.” 

The ruling comes at a time when Texas’s governor, Greg Abbot, is saying that rather than relying on measures related to the pandemic emergency he will be invoking an “invasion” clause of the American and Texas constitutions to combat illegal immigration through his state. 

In a letter sent to Texas county judges on Monday, Mr. Abbot said that Mr. Biden “has abandoned his responsibility to enforce immigration laws,” resulting in a record number of migrants crossing the border illegally. 

As a result, Mr. Abbot will “fully authorize Texas to take unprecedented measures to defend our state against an invasion.” In the letter, he also wrote that he intended to activate the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety, and build a border wall to stem the flow of illegal crossings.  Last month border patrol officers encountered 164,837 migrants at the American-Mexican border, more than twice the number in October 2021. 

Intending to lift Title 42, the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year released a 20-page plan to manage an increase of migrant encounters at the border. The CDC agreed that given the current public health conditions, the order was no longer needed.

Yet, in May a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the Biden administration from lifting Title 42, and the government has been relying on it since.