A federal judge in Louisiana ruled Friday that the Biden administration cannot lift a controversial pandemic policy allowing border agents to quickly expel migrants back to their home countries. The Trump-era measure, Title 42, was enacted in March 2020 in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus and has been used to deport migrants more than 1.5 million times, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows. Officials with the Department of Homeland Security have said they could receive 18,000 migrants a day when the policy is lifted. “The Biden administration is probably breathing a sigh of relief because they weren’t ready for the rule to be lifted, ” Wayne Cornelius, director emeritus of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in early April that Title 42 was no longer necessary to control the spread of COVID since vaccines are widely available.