Biden’s asylum restrictions working as predicted, and as warned
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A migrant family crosses through border fencing into the US on June 26 in Ruby, Arizona.
PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON – In the months since US President Joe Biden imposed sweeping restrictions on asylum at the US-Mexico border, the policy appears to be working exactly as he had hoped and his critics had feared.
The number of people asking for haven in the United States has dropped by 50 per cent since June, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Border agents are operating more efficiently, administration officials say, and many of the hot spots along the border have calmed.
But migrant activists say Mr Biden’s executive order is weeding out far too many people. They say the figures are so low in part because of a little-noticed clause in the new policy which changed how migrants are treated when they first arrive at the border.
Under the new rules, border agents are no longer required to ask migrants whether they fear for their lives if they are returned home. Unless the migrants raise such a fear on their own, they are quickly processed for deportation to their home countries.
It is difficult to know how many people with legitimate cases are turned back because they do not know to “manifest fear”, as the practice is known.
“The government knows full well from past practice that the manifestation standard will result in migrants with legitimate asylum claims being denied even a screening for danger,” Mr Lee Gelernt, lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued to block the policy in federal court, said in an e-mail.
“Put simply, the manifestation standard will send migrants fleeing for their life back to grave danger, and the government knows it.”
Mr Biden’s executive order mandates that only people who enter the country at an official port of entry with an appointment can be considered for asylum at the southern border, with only limited exceptions.
Before the new rules went into effect, migrants would cross the border illegally and seek out border agents to surrender, knowing that anyone who set foot on US soil could ask for protection.
Often, after an initial screening, they would be released into the US to wait, sometimes for years, for their cases to come up. Now, the majority of migrants are being turned back quickly. NYTIMES
