El Paso, Texas — The Biden administration has finalized a sweeping restriction on asylum that it plans to use to expedite expedited deportations of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border after the Title 42 pandemic era. expiration of emergency policy on Thursday, according to internal documents obtained by CBS News.
Hundreds of US asylum officers received training on how to enforce the restriction Tuesday and the regulation is expected to be released Wednesday, less than 48 hours before Title 42 expires, according to people familiar with the effort that They requested anonymity to discuss internal plans.
The regulation, which is expected to be challenged in federal court, will be a dramatic change in asylum policy, disqualifying migrants from US protection if they do not apply for refugee status in another country, such as Mexico, on their journey to the United States. southern border.
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The rule also represents a major twist by President Biden, a Democrat who campaigned to restore access to the US asylum system after numerous Trump administration rules made it harder for migrants to gain refuge on US soil. In fact, the regulation due to be released Wednesday resembles a Trump-era policy struck down in federal court that Biden denounced in 2020.
If upheld, the Biden administration will cement a growing bipartisan rejection of asylum laws that Congress enacted in 1980 to comply with international treaties designed to prevent nations from turning refugees away to places where they could be persecuted, as it did. United States with some Jews. fleeing Nazi Germany.
The turn of the year in the making has intensified recently, as record-high levels of immigrant arrivals have strained a massively backward asylum system, overwhelmed border communities and created political liability for Biden ahead of his run for President. re-election.
Under the rule, migrants who cross the southern border without authorization will be presumed ineligible for asylum if they cannot prove they previously applied for protection in a third country. In practice, it will disqualify most non-Mexican immigrants entering the US between ports of entry for asylum.
Migrants who secure an appointment to enter the US under a system driven by a mobile application you will not be barred from asylum under the policy. The rule will also not apply to unaccompanied children.
According to internal training documents, only migrants with “exceptionally compelling circumstances” will be allowed to pass the rule’s asylum bar. They include migrants with an “acute medical emergency,” those facing an “extreme and imminent threat” in Mexico, and victims of “a serious form of human trafficking.”
To avoid being deported and banished from the US for five years, those who do not qualify for any waiver will be required to pass interviews with high standards designed to elicit more rejection than traditional “credible fear” interviews, according to the training. materials
The restriction is the centerpiece of the Biden administration’s attempt to mitigate a potentially historic spike in the number of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border when Title 42 removals are suspended at midnight Thursday. Unauthorized arrivals at the border have already skyrocketed, with Border Patrol averaging more than 8,700 daily apprehensions of migrants over a three-day period last week, up from the average of 5,200 in March.
While Title 42 allowed US border officials to cite public health concerns to remove hundreds of thousands of migrants without hearing their asylum claims, the new rule is, in many ways, tougher policy. Because migrants removed under Title 42 did not face criminal or immigration penalties, the measure encouraged some to make repeated attempts to cross the border.
But those who cannot prove they are eligible for a waiver to the rule finalized this week will face swift deportation to Mexico or their country of origin, as well as a five-year removal from the US, under a process known as removal. accelerated. If they try to re-enter the US after being deported, they could face criminal prosecution and jail time, the Biden administration has warned.
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Biden administration officials have said the asylum restriction was not their first or second “preference” but have justified the move by citing record levels of immigration apprehensions reported by US border agents in recent years. two years. Without the rule, the administration said, the number of migrants crossing the southern border each day could rise to 13,000 after Title 42 ends.
The administration has also argued that the rule will encourage immigrants to enter the country legally, including through a phone app that allows asylum seekers in Mexico to apply for entry into the United States, and a sponsorship initiative that allows up 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans with US sponsors to fly to the US each month.
“President Biden is leading the greatest expansion of legal avenues to protection in decades and could be doing much more if Congress allowed him to,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan said Tuesday.
While the partial asylum ban won support from some centrist Democrats, it has been strongly repudiated by supporters, progressives and former Biden officials, who argue that the policy ignores US asylum law, under which immigrants on US soil have the right to apply for refugee status, regardless of how they entered the country.
“This is a profound change for a Democratic president to implement a new ban on asylum seekers,” said Andrea Flores, who served as a White House border official during the first year of the Biden administration. “It is evidence that the past decade of far-right attacks on black and brown asylum seekers has significantly weakened the Democratic Party’s commitment to providing refuge to people fleeing persecution and torture.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which convinced federal courts to block the Trump administration’s asylum “transit ban,” has vowed to file a lawsuit against the Biden administration’s rule as well.
“We will sue like we did Trump,” Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s top immigration attorney, told CBS News on Tuesday. “The core illegality is the same.”
During one of the 2020 presidential debates, Biden denounced former President Donald Trump for being “the first president in the history of the United States” to declare that “anyone seeking asylum has to do so in another country.”
But soon after Biden took office, his administration considered doing just that amid a surge in border crossings. The regulation, however, It was rejected in 2021 amid opposition from some appointees and a determination by top White House counsel that the measure could have been struck down in court.
The Biden administration has strongly denied that the regulation finalized this week is similar to the Trump-era asylum ban, arguing that its approach is different because its restriction has broader exemptions and is combined with expanded channels for immigrants to enter. the US with legal permission. .
