Trump Ended Asylum at the Border Indefinitely. But Apparently That's Not Enough
Over the past couple of years, the Trump administration has been slowing chipping away at asylum seekers’ ability to seek refuge in the United States. With the advent of the coronavirus, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller finally had their chance to shut down the border indefinitely, ending asylum as we know it, at least through the 2020 election.
But on Wednesday, they proved that they won’t stop until the border is virtually sealed to asylum seekers in the future—COVID-19 or not. The Department of Homeland Security posted 161 pages of proposed regulations that, according to advocates and attorneys, include virtually everything the White House has wanted to do to gut asylum in the United States.
Before most of us could finish reading the dense, legalistic document, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick already had broken it down on Twitter, calling the “Kafkaesque” new rules a “sick joke.” So I called Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, to make sense of what these proposed changes could mean for tens of thousands of people who are seeking refugee here. “The top line here is that the Trump administration is frustrated that it’s been losing in court on the definition of asylum,” he said. “So rather than accept that its definition is wrong, it wants to simply change the rules and declare itself the winner.”
The proposed changes would create brand new bars for asylum and redefine what asylum means. Essentially, Reichlin-Melnick said, the Trump administration is saying: “If we don’t get you one way, we’re going to get you another way. If we don’t get you a third way, we’ll get you a fourth way. Every single one of these things are overlapping tools to ensure that no one wins asylum.”
Here are some of the most egregious proposed rules that Reichlin-Melnick flagged:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/06/donald-trump-stephen-miller-border-end-of-asylum/