WASHINGTON — Even before the political spectacle of a Republican governor flying migrants to a small vacation island in Massachusetts, President Biden’s top border officials decided there needed to be a better asylum system in America.
Due to new global migration patterns, people are heading toward the southern border of the United States, many fleeing instability, persecution, war, famine, and economic hardship. The numbers are overwhelming; for the first time, the number of arrests of undocumented immigrants along the southwest border exceeded two million in one year.
Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans join others lured by America’s roaring labor market and the fact that Mr. Biden has promised not to separate families, build a wall across the border or force asylum seekers to wait in squalid camps in Mexico — all together policy. embraced by former President Donald J. Trump.
But the question that remains has vexed presidents and lawmakers of both parties for decades.
What do we do with all these people?
Sir. Biden has no silver bullet for overhauling the immigration system without bipartisan support from Congress, a prospect no one in Washington expects anytime soon. But after months of White House debate, the Biden administration has begun to address a small part of the problem: the woefully backlogged process for determining who qualifies for asylum or protection from persecution in the United States.
The goal is to speed up the system, including by giving asylum officers — not just immigration judges — the power to decide who can stay and who must be turned away. Migrants will be interviewed 21 to 45 days after they apply for asylum, far faster than the years it can take in the existing immigration court system. A decision on whether the migrant gets asylum must come quickly – within two to five weeks of the interview.
For now, the changes are small; only 99 people since the end of May have completed what are called asylum merit interviews with an asylum officer and been fully evaluated under the new rules. Of those, 24 have been granted asylum, while most of the rest have had their cases sent back to the immigration court system for appeal.
Officials said they were moving slowly to test the procedures and that it would take hundreds of officers — who have yet to be hired — to expand the system.
The new rules will not address the social and economic forces in other countries that drive migrants to flee. They will not change the overburdened system for dealing with immigrants who do not seek asylum. And the challenge of how to quickly deport those denied asylum will remain.
Still, supporters of the new process say it’s a fundamental rethinking of the system after years in which previous administrations focused heavily on increasing the number of immigration judges.
“We are building a foundation for a new way of handling asylum applications,” said Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security whose department oversees the immigration system.
In some communities where jobs are not being filled, people have welcomed the influx of migrants looking for work.
But Republicans such as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas have condemned the large numbers of people arriving in border towns. Mr. DeSantis told reporters this month that he would continue to send migrants to other parts of the United States, saying that liberal enclaves like Martha’s Vineyard — where he flew dozens of immigrants — are too far away from the wave of migrants and their impact on local communities.
He said his solution to the immigration issue was to send migrants “back to Mexico or back to the homeland” — a reflection of Mr. Trump’s “build the wall, keep them out” mentality that many Republicans have come to embrace.
After a group of migrants sued Mr DeSantis, saying they were tricked into boarding the planes, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, angrily wrote on Twitter: “Apparently America is the only nation on earth where you can come in by violating our laws and then a week later sue the government whose laws you violated.”
Asked about Republican efforts to transport migrants, Mr Mayorkas was blunt.
“What we do is manage,” he said. “They politicize and exploit people for non-governing purposes.”
But not all immigration rights activists are on board either, saying the administration’s new process is moving too quickly.
Eleanor Acer, the director of the refugee protection program at Human Rights First, said migrants should be given more time to find lawyers and collect their personal documents.
But she added: “If the process was improved and adequately resourced, it would be a game changer.”
A Surging Backlog
The migrants come across the border from Mexico, risking death by crossing the Rio Grande, only to find a Border Patrol officer and willingly turn themselves in, hoping to win asylum — the right to build a new life in America. To see also : 10 Best Detectives In Video Games.
Ramon Colmenares, 30, was one of them. Born in Venezuela, he worked in Peru for about two years before embarking on a perilous two-month trek to the United States this summer. In August, he braved the river’s turbulent waters up to his neck to reach the American side and request asylum.
“Here I can help my family more than from anywhere else,” he said after being sent to Washington, D.C., on a bus arranged by Governor Abbott. He went to New York City, where he has lived in a shelter.
To win asylum, migrants like Mr. Colmenares prove that being sent home would expose them to persecution based on their “race, religion, nationality, political opinions or membership of a particular social group.” Being poor or wanting a better job is not enough.
Since taking office, Mr Biden’s administration has faced a surge of migrants from countries where the coronavirus pandemic decimated economies and livelihoods, such as India, Brazil and Colombia. More recently, repression of political dissent in Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia and elsewhere has forced people to seek asylum in the United States.
In theory, the American asylum system should work quickly. Those granted asylum will be granted work authorization, qualify for safety net benefits and ultimately be allowed to apply for a green card and citizenship. Those who are denied asylum and do not qualify to stay in the United States through other programs would quickly be deported.
But it doesn’t work that way. The lengthy asylum process, Mr. Mayorkas said, is “a very broken system.”
Migrants crossing the border between official ports of entry are detained and given a background check. Some are being deported under a pandemic-era rule introduced by Mr. Trump. For others, the law requires due process before they are sent home. Because there simply isn’t enough capacity to detain everyone; most of the rest are released to the United States to wait years for a hearing before an immigration judge who will decide their fate. The backlog in the immigration court system has risen to historic proportions, with 1.9 million pending cases, up from about 150,000 in 2001, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks immigration data. Of those, around 750,000 are asylum cases, most of which have been pending for five years or longer.
Asylum seekers are not allowed to work legally in the United States for about a year while they pursue their case. Studies have found that most asylum seekers show up for their hearings, but some who are refused asylum try to stay and work illegally.
Officials at the Justice Department, which oversees the immigration court, requested $177 million this year to add 100 judges and support staff. That would increase the number of immigration judges to about 700, according to the department, which wrote in its budget request that “the historic backlog is unsustainable and requires additional resources for justice to occur.”
The latest surge includes Venezuelans who have fled the government of President Nicolás Maduro, who has been accused by rights groups of stifling dissent and targeting his opposition. The exodus of nearly seven million people, amid rising inflation and an economic collapse, now dwarfs that of Syrians and is on par with Ukrainians fleeing the war in Europe.
When Mr. Colmenares was offered a ride to Washington, he said he had no idea the bus service was provided by the governor of Texas, and he gladly accepted.
“I thought,” he said, “I was so lucky that I didn’t have to spend another night at the border.”
A New Approach
The goal of the new asylum system is speed. See the article : When Can I Travel to Japan? Pre-Arrival Travel Tests Could Soon Be Abolished.
By allowing cases to be decided by an asylum officer instead of a judge, officials hope to make decisions within four to six weeks instead of the years it takes now. (Aliens judges must have a law degree and at least seven years’ experience as a lawyer. Asylum officers do not need a law degree, but must, among other things, participate in a five-week basic training course).
Currently, the administration has reassigned 140 asylum officers — out of about 650 who work in the agency — to conduct the new asylum merit interviews. In his budget, Mr Biden has requested funding for a total of 800 asylum officers for the new system and 1,200 additional support staff. Officials said that would eventually allow the government to conduct 150,000 interviews each year.
The money to boost the system wouldn’t necessarily require congressional approval, but US Citizenship and Immigration Services would most likely have to raise fees on things like visa applications to hire more asylum officers.
Mr. Mayorkas said the new system was working as expected and cases were moving quickly. Finally, he said, it could reduce the incentive for migrants to trek to the border in the first place because they would know their case would be resolved quickly.
Mayorkas said the percentage of people granted asylum in the new system – about a quarter of the 99 cases – was similar to the percentage from the older, slower system, suggesting that applicants were not disadvantaged by the speed of the process. .
52 migrants who were not granted asylum under the new rules have been returned to the immigration court system for an expedited hearing before a judge. Most will likely be ordered removed by an immigration judge and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, officials said.
“It’s early days, but there’s every indication that it’s having a very significant positive impact,” Mr. Mayorkas, “both in the delivery of speed and in providing due process rights that we have secured to the community.”
Immigration rights advocates remain skeptical.
Karen Musalo, the director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at Hastings College of the Law, part of the University of California, praised the Biden administration’s efforts to find a more efficient way to quickly process asylum applications.
But she said it was not clear that migrants were given due process or time in the new system to process their cases properly.
“Almost every attorney I know who represents asylum seekers, including myself, believes that the trade-offs in the regulation, in terms of the accelerated timelines for each part of the process, are too high a price to pay,” Ms. Musalo.
Conservatives have also vowed to continue fighting the new rules in court, calling them nothing more than an effort to allow more migrants into the country.
Stephen Miller, the architect behind Mr. Trump’s attack on immigration, said the real goal of the new rules was to “mass-relocate criminal invaders across the country,” adding that “the only solution in the world to the problem of illegal immigration is deportation. Full stop.”
Mayorkas dismissed the criticism.
“It does not weaken enforcement. It does not undermine due process,” he said. But he added: “This isn’t something that’s going to be full throttle in six months. That’s just the reality of it.”
