A federal judge in Washington on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s proclamation freezing most asylum claims at the southern border.

Federal District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Randolph Moss wrote in a 128-page opinion that the president lacked authority under immigration law and the U.S. Constitution to issue the proclamation. The judge, an Obama appointee, stayed his ruling for 14 days to give the Trump administration a chance to appeal.

“The Court recognizes that the Executive Branch faces enormous challenges in preventing and deterring unlawful entry into the United States and in adjudicating the overwhelming backlog of asylum claims of those who have entered the country,” wrote Moss. “But the [Immigration and Nationality Act], by its terms, provides the sole and exclusive means for removing people already present in the country.”

“Nor can Article II’s Vesting Clause or Article IV’s Invasion Clause be read to grant the President or his delegees authority to adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted and the regulations that the responsible agencies have promulgated,” the judge continued.

The ruling could knock down a key piece of Trump’s border policy just at the White House is celebrating a massive drop in immigration since Trump took office.

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In his ruling, Moss granted class-action status to the lawsuit and said it would apply to “all individuals who are or will be subject to the Proclamation and/or its implementation and who are now or will be present in the United States.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller slammed and ridiculed the ruling, taking special issue with the scope of its effect.

“To try to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling on nationwide injunctions a marxist judge has declared that all potential FUTURE illegal aliens on foreign soil (eg a large portion of planet earth) are part of a protected global ‘class’ entitled to admission into the United States,” Miller posted on X.

“The West will not survive if our sovereignty is not restored,” he added, likely referring to judicial overreach that has stymied the president’s agenda through broad injunctions delivered by lower court judges.

Last week, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion curbing district court judges’ authority to issue nationwide injunctions on presidential orders.

“[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the court’s opinion.

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” she said.

Trump issued a proclamation on his first day in office restricting asylum claims at the southern border, calling the flood of illegal immigration that swamped the United States’ southern border an “invasion” and arguing that the mass of unchecked people represented a significant “public-health concern.”

A Washington, D.C., judge on Tuesday said President Donald Trump did not have the authority to name the leader of a small, USAID-like agency after an African company sued, citing the hardship of having to lay off its workers.

Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that Trump appointee Pete Marocco, who oversaw the demolition of USAID, was not validly appointed to the African Development Foundation, where he played a similar role, and, therefore, had no authority to terminate grants.

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit brought by a consulting firm in Zambia, called Rural Development Innovations Limited, represented by lawyers from the left-wing American group Democracy Forward.

Trump fired the entirety of the African Development Foundation’s board, and the agency locked its doors to prevent Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees from gaining access to its books. One of the fired board members sued, but Judge Leon tossed that lawsuit, affirming that the president had the right to fire board members.

In this second lawsuit, though, Leon indicated that Trump likely did not have the power to determine who runs the agency in the board members’ absence. Under the legislation establishing the Foundation, the president nominates board members, but they must be confirmed by the Senate.

Marocco had been named “acting” chairman of the board. The chief role of the board is to appoint a president who runs day-to-day operations, and Marocco appointed himself.

The Trump administration argued that “because the Federal Vacancies Act does not apply to the Foundation, the President has the inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to designate acting members of the Foundation Board until the Senate confirms his nominees to fill full terms… The President must be able to designate acting officials to fulfill his duty.”

It is unclear how Leon believes the management of the federal agency should be chosen, since he acknowledges that the agency has no board. The African Development Foundation’s previous president, Travis Adkins, who was accused of anti-white racism and abuse of employees, resigned before the DOGE takeover.

After Adkins’s resignation, the role was filled by a committee of the agency’s three top employees, including Chief Financial Officer Mathieu Zahui. The USAID inspector general presented evidence in court in November 2024 that Zahui steered contracts to a friend in exchange for kickbacks, but he has so far not been criminally charged.

If the group’s staff is reinstated and its top management structure restored, that would put the subject of a criminal investigation in charge of an agency, instead of the president’s appointee.

Rural Development Innovations Limited “offers clients broad expertise in financial management, enterprise development, organizational capacity development, strategy development and implementation, project management, marketing and market access development,” its lawyers wrote.

Yet it doesn’t actually have any clients except the United States government. They added: “RDI receives 100% of its funding from USADF and has been awarded a USADF grant that continues through 2028. Yet in April 2025, RDI received notice from Pete Marocco that its grant was being terminated immediately because RDI somehow no longer satisfied USADF’s priorities. As a result, RDI will be forced to shut down entirely by the end of June 2025.”

Judge Leon wrote that “RDI has shown irreparable injury… Traditionally, ‘economic loss does not, in and of itself constitute irreparable harm,'” but an “exception exists when ‘the loss threatens the very existence of the movant’s business.” That exception applied because RDI had no customers other than the United States government. RDI argued that America had an obligation not to terminate its funding because Zambian law requires the payment of severance to laid-off employees, which it could not afford to do.

Two African Development Foundation employees were also plaintiffs in the lawsuit. But, unlike the African company, the American workers had no recourse, the judge ruled.

Leon wrote that “RDI requests that the Court preliminarily enjoin all defendants–including the President of the United States.” The court does not have the power to enjoin the president, he wrote, but the injunction blocks Marocco “from taking actions as the acting chairperson of the United States African Development Foundation’s board of directors and president,” and White House, Treasury, and Department of Government Efficiency officials, from “implementing or giving effect to directives from Marocco.”

An injunction is a temporary order that gives relief to one side while a final resolution is pending. It is given when the judge believes a party is likely to win the case and will suffer harm in the meantime if it has to wait months.

Typically, a party seeking an injunction is supposed to post a monetary bond that would be used to compensate the opposing party if that party ultimately wins the case. The Trump administration has highlighted the role that such bonds would play in preventing groups from seeking endless injunctions by giving them skin in the game.

But courts have “discretion…to determine the appropriate amount of an injunction bond,” Judge Leon wrote, and he would require no bond at all from the African group, since the Trump administration has “not argued that they will suffer monetary loss if the Court were to issue an injunction.”

A four-part Daily Wire series documented significant ethical and financial problems at the African Development Foundation, which former employees said was likely the reason it was so opposed to scrutiny by DOGE:

PART ONE: Foreign Aid Official Who Resisted DOGE Took Secret Payments After Steering Africa Money To Friend 

PART TWO: African Aid Agency Used Foreign Pass-Throughs To Hide Money That Went To D.C. Staff

PART THREE: Aid Agency Pushed Official’s For-Profit Pyramid Scheme On Poor Africans

PART FOUR: ‘Them White Motherf-ers’: Racist Agency Framed Its Lawyer After He Discovered Lawbreaking, He Says