White House Planning Sweeping Changes to Asylum System to Combat Border Crisis
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In an effort to curb the immigration crisis at the southern border, President Joe Biden’s administration is working on a bill to overhaul the country’s asylum adjudication system in a bid to speed up the operation of border processing centers, according to a new report.
The developing legislation, first reported by Reuters, may include distinct asylum procedures based upon an individual’s nationality, giving preference to migrants from countries with higher rates of historical approval and conferring them with greater mobility until their case is settled.
Conversely, deportations could be expedited for claimants from countries with lower success rates. For example, in fiscal 2022 Chinese asylum seekers won 53 percent of their cases, while Hondurans lost 92 percent of the time.
Asylum-seekers with better chances of winning their cases could be housed in apartments rather than in detention centers, two Department of Homeland Security officials told Reuters.
“It’s a total rethink of the approach and is not constrained by current laws,” an unnamed DHS official told Reuters.
However, the bill is still at a conceptual level and far from being presented to the White House or Congress.
“We are still in the very early phases of this and it could be something that people look at and say, ‘No, we’re not going to do that,'” another DHS staffer said.
In recent months, the Biden administration has come under increasing fire from Democratic mayors, principally New York City’s Eric Adams, for its mishandling of the immigration crisis at the southern border. Adams has spoken out as Republican governors in southern states like Florida and Texas have bussed tens of thousands of migrants north to Democratic cities.
“If my house is burning, I don’t want to hear about fire prevention. Let’s put out the fire. And the fire right now is the over-proliferation of migrant and asylum seekers in several cities in the country,” Adams stated in early February on MSNBC.
After a visit to the border town of El Paso, Texas, Adams called on the White House to step in and help. “This is just unfair for cities to carry the weight of a national problem,” he said.
Biden has presided over a period of record-breaking illegal immigration since he took office in January 2021.
Last month, in an effort to blunt Republican criticism of his handling of the border, Biden introduced new immigration restrictions to rapidly expel immigrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti who are caught crossing the border illegally. The effort is an expansion of Title 42, a pandemic-era public health policy curtailing illegal border crossings.
Although illegal border crossings have declined in recent months, law enforcement in border regions are still clamoring for reform.
“I have personally experienced the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a border county,” Mark Dannels, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., said before House Judiciary hearings last week. “Currently, this is the ugliest I’ve experienced.”
