Jeff Sessions is asking a federal judge to quash a subpoena requesting he provide testimony in the case of three Central American families who claim they were harmed by the Trump administration’s family separation policy at the border.

Sessions, a former U.S. senator from Alabama who was U.S. attorney general at the time the policy was implemented, cited precedent that courts can’t compel presidential cabinet officials to testify, according to his motion to quash the subpoena in federal court in Mobile.

He also claimed the information the families’ lawsuit seeks can be gathered from other sources and that his testimony would be unnecessary.

The three families said they fled violence in Central America and sought asylum in the United States in 2018.

They were arrested by Border Patrol agents, who separated the parents from the children and detained them apart from each other for two to three months, according to their lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California.

While Sessions is asking the court that he not be compelled to testify, the families wanted Sessions’ motion to be decided by a judge in California, not Mobile.

On Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Jeffrey U. Beaverstock in Mobile denied the plaintiffs’ motion to transfer the subpoena issue to California, saying doing so would unnecessarily burden Sessions, according to Courthouse News Service.

Beaverstock’s ruling was not in court records as of early Thursday evening.

Sessions’ attorney, Charles Cooper, argued in court filings in Mobile that U.S. Supreme Court precedent was on Sessions’ side.

“To permit this deposition to proceed would ignore Supreme Court precedent that has categorically prohibited, as a matter of the constitutional separation of powers, the federal courts from compelling the testimony of a member of the President’s Cabinet in order to probe his or her subjective intentions and mental processes in official decision-making,” he wrote.

Furthermore, the plaintiffs have not met other legal requirements, Cooper argued.

“They have not made the threshold ‘strong showing of bad faith or improper behavior,’ nor have they shown that the information they seek from General Sessions is not obtainable from other sources,” the motion states. “To the contrary, plaintiffs have admitted in their briefing in the underlying case that they have obtained through discovery what they contend is such evidence and point to that very evidence as justification for this deposition. The court should, accordingly, grant General Sessions’ motion to quash.”

The plaintiffs’ lawsuit is among dozens across the country from families who say they suffered from the policy, which was withdrawn after it was ruled unconstitutional.

The Justice Department settled a class action suit last month.

“The practice of separating families at the southwest border was shameful,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement announcing the settlement.