Illegal immigrants have taken advantage of America’s asylum process for years by making false claims, bogging down the courts, and delaying their deportations.
The Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Justice issued new rules to clamp down on illegal aliens claiming asylum, prompted by a series of immigration court decisions. The changes should speed up the deportation process if they don’t have a valid claim.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently issued the new rules that make it harder for asylum seekers to win their cases while eliminating the requirement to give them a hearing if the claim seems bogus, The Washington Times reported.
As attorney general, Bondi can rule on immigration cases and make changes to the standards for asylum.
In one case, she said that claiming fear of gangs in their country of origin isn’t sufficient to obtain asylum. In another ruling, she said the fear of domestic violence didn’t qualify. Her decision largely rejects domestic violence as grounds for asylum, the Daily Journal reported.
Both decisions are former policies from the first Trump administration, which Attorney General Merrick Garland overturned during the Biden administration.
In another major reversal, the Board of Immigration Appeals barred most illegal immigrants from winning release on bond. In a Sept. 5 ruling, the Board said asylum-seekers could be treated like new arrivals at the border, which meant no bond, because they hadn’t been formally admitted.
The Board’s decision means those who crossed the border illegally — known as entering without inspection — and reached the interior will not be let free on bond while they await their court hearing.
Under the Biden administration, many asylum-seekers were released on bond if they didn’t have a serious criminal record and weren’t deemed a danger or flight risk.
Judges can also “pretermit” asylum claims that appear bogus without a hearing. Under previous rules, judges had to hold a hearing even if the evidence showed the migrant didn’t have a valid claim.
“Nonenforcement of the laws by the Biden administration caused the backlog to explode and incentivized even more illegal immigration,” an unnamed senior Justice Department official told The Washington Times. “These decisions reflect the attorney general’s commitment to reversing those trends and enforcing the immigration laws as written.”
The Justice Department oversees the immigration courts, which rule on asylum claims and order deportations for those found in the country’s interior.
As The Washington Times reported, “the courts have become the soft underbelly of the system. Migrants figured out that bringing bogus asylum claims can delay deportation for years, giving them a foothold in the United States.”
The Biden administration’s open border failures created a crisis by flooding the courts with asylum claims. Pending court cases surged from 1.5 million at the end of fiscal year 2020 to more than 4.2 million late last year.
Bondi’s Justice Department is tackling the backlog but has a long way to go with 3.8 million pending cases as of July, The Washington Times reported.
Judges are completing cases at more than double the pace, and new cases have plummeted due to Trump’s closed border.
Former immigration Judge Andrew “Art” Arthur called the new rules a “game changer” and a “huge time savings.”
Arthur, now with the Center for Immigration Studies, said they will help quickly eliminate asylum cases with no chance of success and, in turn, speed up legitimate asylum case hearings.
Immigrant rights’ advocates argue it’s dismantling the asylum process and rolling back protections for a large group of immigrants. Women and families may still qualify for asylum, but others will be returned to dangerous situations in their home country.
The bond policy means many will have to choose between long-term detention to fight their cases or agree to be deported, The Washington Times reported.
“The BIA’s decision to remove the long-standing authority of immigration judges to conduct bond hearings will subject millions of people, many of whom have lived and contributed to our nation for years, to detention without a fair judicial review of their cases,” said Sui Chung, executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice.
Trump officials have also reportedly fired dozens of immigration judges, particularly those who recklessly or excessively granted asylum. That includes Democratic-appointed members of the Board of Immigration Appeals, paving the way for the changes this month, The Washington Times reported.
Reuters also recently reported that Trump’s administration plans to call for limiting the right to asylum worldwide at the United Nations later this month, according to two internal planning documents reviewed by Reuters and a State Department spokesperson.
The proposal would sharply narrow the right to asylum and undermine protections from persecution, according to critics.
Under the proposed framework, asylum seekers would be required to claim protection in the first country they enter, not a nation of their choosing, the spokesperson said.
The plan would make asylum temporary and allow the host country to determine whether conditions in the asylum seekers home country had improved enough to return, a major shift from how asylum works in the U.S. and elsewhere.
One of the documents describes migration as “a defining challenge for the world in the 21st century” and says asylum “is routinely abused to enable economic migration,” Reuters reported.
Andrew Veprek, Trump’s nominee to run the State Department’s refugee division, called for reshaping the global approach to asylum during his recent Senate confirmation hearing.
“Perhaps the most important root cause of the mass and illegal migration today is the abuse of refugee and asylum systems,” Veprek said. “The current framework of international agreements and norms on migration developed after the Second World War in a completely different geopolitical and economic context. It cannot be expected to function in our modern world, and indeed it does not.”
