In an astonishing instance of judicial activism, a federal judge has ruled that unvetted Central American caravan migrants seeking U.S. asylum no longer have to wait it out in Mexico. 

According to NBC News:

A federal judge in California issued an order Monday blocking the Trump administration's policy of returning some asylum-seekers to Mexico while they wait for a court appearance.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg's nationwide ruling will not go into effect until Friday, to give the administration time to appeal.

Outgoing Homeland Security chief Kirstjen Nielsen announced the launch of the Migrant Protection Protocols in San Diego, the country's busiest border crossing, in January.  Under the policy, Customs and Border Protection officers and agents have the authority to turn around asylum-seekers crossing in the San Diego and El Paso sectors.  Families seeking asylum had previously been allowed to stay in the United States while awaiting their court hearings.

A lawsuit filed on behalf of 11 asylum-seekers from Central America had argued that being sent back across the border could expose them to "undue risk to their lives or freedom."

So they can all come live and work here to wait out their nearly always meritless asylum cases in court, something that gives them a minimum of several free years of worry-free U.S. residency at zero cost.  Legal immigrants, on the other hand, will continue to have to wait it out in their home countries with their applications to move here, with ten-year or more backlogs, as well as pay high administrative costs if they want to do it the legal way.

Any questions now as to why a million people are planning to enter the U.S. without papers in this year alone?  With a ruling like that, it's an open bar for those who want to enter the U.S. without vetting.

President Trump railed against the illogic of it all here:

A 9th Circuit Judge just ruled that Mexico is too dangerous for migrants. So unfair to the U.S. OUT OF CONTROL! https://t.co/XF8o3jMDle

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 9, 2019

Not only is it profoundly unfair to those who seek to enter the U.S. the legal way, but it's stunningly unfair to Americans here who will inevitably fall victim to the crimes and costs of this legally sanctioned unvetted migration.  The judge's ruling allows all askers in, premised on a pontification about asylum-seekers being unsafe in Mexico.  The reality is, they aren't unsafe in Mexico, if they go to a city such as Guanajuato, which has less crime than the U.S., but yes, they have some risks in border areas, precisely because they have involvement with gangs, smugglers, and cartels at the edge of the U.S. border.  Fact is, all borderlands, worldwide, are unsafe.  They're unsafe because people there are unsorted and unvetted.  The U.S. border areas of the U.S. are as unsafe as the ones in Mexico.  Telling the asylum-seekers — and the criminals they have paid to smuggle them in — that they can all come into the States now and everyone will just naturally be safe isn't going to happen.  What will happen is that the so-called asylum-seekers will bring the unsafeness of the borderlands to the U.S. heartland.  The judge doesn't address that issue, or the rights of Americans to be safe in their homeland, too.  Supposedly, we have invincible cops to take care of the whole thing, and it's not his job to consider whether they will be overwhelmed by a million unvetted people rolling in.

As Richard Fernandez notes in a must-read essay from a couple days ago, vetting matters, and walls matter — walls are there to rationalize information, to sort out people fleeing from people persecuting.  A judge's rejecting of the legitimacy of walls renders actual asylum meaningless:

What's the use of fleeing to the United States if MS-13 murderers can simply follow in the victims' wake?  As someone noted on Twitter, "If America is to be a place of asylum then there has to be a way to discriminate between those who flee danger and those who are the danger.  The border is the only place for that to happen."

With an open border and all askers now entitled by a leftist judge to enter, the question now is "asylum from what"?

Image credit: AFP via YouTube, screen shot.