The US District Court for the Southern District of California Friday expanded the scope of a preliminary injunction that blocked a Trump administration policy severely limiting asylum claims at US ports of entry.

The Trump administration first introduced its Asylum Eligibility and Procedural Modifications policy in July 2019. The interim rule found that “an alien who enters or attempts to enter the United States across the southern border after failing to apply for protection in a third country outside the alien’s country of citizenship, nationality, or last lawful habitual residence through which the alien transited en route to the United States is ineligible for asylum.” Legal challenges to the asylum ban were rapidly filed and US District Judge Cynthia Bashant first granted a preliminary injunction in November 2019 that extended only to members who were turned away based on the US “metering policy,” but before the asylum ban went into effect.

The metering policy is a waitlist system “in which asylum seekers were instructed to ‘wait on the bridge in the pre-inspection area, or at a shelter’…because the [port of entry] is ‘full’ or ‘at capacity’.” The preliminary injunction potentially first applied only to the potential 26,000 asylum seekers on waitlists at 12 Mexican border cites. In her order issued on Friday, Judge Bashant expanded the scope of the preliminary injunction to retroactively apply to all asylum claims that were denied before the original November 2019 order.

The expanded injunction now requires the Board of Immigration Appeals to “reopen or reconsider their cases or directing DHS attorneys representing the government in such proceedings to affirmatively seek, and not oppose, such reopening or consideration” of class members who were denied asylum based on the asylum ban.