The American Civil Liberties Union is pledging to block President Biden’s plan to try and slow the number of asylum requests at the Mexico border, a challenge which came before the plan was even officially announced. 

On Tuesday, Mr. Biden signed an executive order to try and shut down asylum requests once the average number of daily crossings exceeds 2,500 between ports of entry, an order that is scheduled to go into effect at midnight Tuesday. 

Hours after reports of the order surfaced, the ACLU announced it would sue to stop the measure from going into place. Mr. Biden’s order puts “tens of thousands of lives at risk,” the ACLU said in a statement. “This action takes the same approach as the Trump administration’s asylum ban. We will be challenging this order in court.”

Section 212(f) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act allows the president to suspend immigration for anyone determined to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States.” The act is the basis for Mr. Biden’s order, as it was for President Trump when he moved to ban immigrants from majority-Muslim countries, which the Fourth Circuit “dismissed with prejudice.”

Mr. Biden’s measure is sparking backlash from other immigration advocacy groups that view it as a human rights violation. The director of refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA, Amy Fischer, said the order “plays into false narratives about invasions at the border and advances a policy grounded in white supremacist ideas at the expense of people in search of safety in the US,” according to the Independent. 

The executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, which works with Haitian migrants at the border, Guerline Jozef, called the order “a direct assault on the fundamental human right to seek asylum.” The president and the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, Jennie Murray, said ahead of the order’s signing on Tuesday that “politics are driving the immigration conversation in an increasingly restrictive direction.”