How to make President Donald Trump’s immigration pause stick in court

President Donald Trump promised to pause Third World immigration. Here’s how to make it stick against inevitable court challenges.

First, the president should use his authority under 8 U.S.C. 1182(f), but with a twist. That law authorizes the president to suspend the entry of “all aliens or any class of aliens,” whenever he finds their entry would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” The plain language is broad, encompassing economic and social interests, not just national security. Every president since Ronald Reagan has invoked it. The Supreme Court upheld it in 2018, noting the statute “exudes deference to the President.”

However, targeting specific countries invites unnecessary challenges: national origin discrimination, demands for statistical justification, probing the details of how the target list was developed. Courts can pick apart country-by-country distinctions endlessly.

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A universal pause sidesteps all of that and there is a compelling justification.

It is “detrimental” to America’s interests to admit more immigrants when our mechanisms for filtering out welfare cases and asylum fraud are so broken. It might not be so bad if we could quickly fix mistakes, but it now takes forever to deport anyone.

Cite asylum. A DHS study found 70 percent of asylum applications involve fraud or suspected fraud. It was so jarring, the Obama administration refused to release it until a whistleblower testified to Congress. Even the New York Times concedes it is a problem. Over 1 million asylum claims were filed in 2023 alone, meaning roughly 700,000 fraudulent applications.

Then there’s the public charge disaster. Since 1882, immigration law has explicitly banned admitting anyone “likely, at any time, to become a public charge.” The logic is simple. It makes no sense to import welfare cases. Yet, 54% of immigrant headed households are on at least one form of public assistance. The reason is that bureaucrats are subverting Congress’s intent by interpreting the bar to apply only if the alien is “primarily dependent” on the benefit and it is paid in cash, meaning taking Medicaid, public housing or food stamps does not count. Efforts to restore the original meaning are tied up in court by activists. Today, over 11% of welfare benefits are claimed by immigrants who were admitted on the explicit premise that they would never claim welfare. It costs taxpayers $109 billion annually.

And that does not even include outright fraud. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota recently charged members of the Somali community in massive fraud schemes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars across child nutrition programs, housing services, and autism treatment. Law enforcement sources confirm that millions in stolen funds were sent back to Somalia, where some “likely ended up in the hands of Al-Shabaab,” a terrorist group.

When the screening mechanism cannot prevent welfare dependency despite explicit statutory prohibitions and cannot detect fraud at an industrial scale, continued mass admission is demonstrably detrimental to the national interest.

The administration’s second line of defense is injunction bonds. Federal law requires that plaintiffs seeking pre-trial injunctions post bond. The bond must be in an amount “proper to pay the costs and damages sustained” by any defendant wrongfully enjoined. Given the welfare outlays at stake, proper bonds should run in the tens of millions. Circuit courts have called adequate bonds “a condition precedent” to issuing an injunction and their absence “reversible error.” The Department must insist on adequate bonds in every case challenging these immigration restrictions and move to invalidate any bondless injunctions.

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Third, while legal battles play out in court, a powerful defensive strategy should be proceeding behind the scenes: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem should rescind delegations of immigration approval authority. Congress vested the power to grant green cards, work authorizations and other benefits in the Secretary of Homeland Security personally. 8 U.S.C. 1255 states that an alien’s status “may be adjusted by the [DHS Secretary], in his discretion” to permanent resident. Even cases handled at consulates start at DHS. In practice, the secretary has delegated this authority down to immigration officers scattered across USCIS field offices. If she revokes these delegations, green card and other select benefit applications would require her personal signature, slowing processing to a crawl. This isn’t a workaround; it’s the secretary exercising the exact authority Congress gave her.

More modest fixes have failed for decades. It’s time to end the immigration debate with decisive action.

The president’s recent post calling for stricter immigration measures is a welcome development, but we have heard this kind of rhetoric before. The MAGA base has lost faith in the ability of the president’s team to follow through on his pronouncements. They need to think creatively and act with a sense of urgency in order to turn the President’s Truths into reality.