Newsman: The Biden administration announced a new policy proposal Tuesday that would limit access to asylum for migrants who cross the United States’ southern border illegally if they fail to apply for protections in another country. President Biden administration officials said they intend to time the implementation of the new policy to coincide with the end of Title 42.
The administration did not give a specific date for when the policy would go into effect. They are required to hold a public comment period that lasts 30 days. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention policy, known as Title 42, is set to expire on May 11. This provision allows the administration to rapidly expel migrants and, in some cases, suspend the right to seek asylum under U.S. law and international treaty.
If the policy is approved, migrants will be ineligible for asylum if they had not used existing lawful processes, such as a humanitarian parole program available for Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians or Cubans; scheduled a time and place of arrival at a port of entry or been denied asylum in a third country they have traveled through.
The administration has said the new program has brought down border encounters. Despite that, the administration fears that border encounters will rise again as Title 42 comes to an end.
The move comes two years after the administration dismantled a similar Trump-era policy that required migrants seeking asylum in the US to first apply for protections in three Central American countries.
In early January, Biden announced new policies that would create a pathway to admit up to 30,000 from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba each month who have a sponsor and pass background checks.
There are exceptions under the new proposed rule.
Migrants who are denied asylum can rebut the claim if they or a family member that they were traveling with faced an acute medical emergency, faced imminent threat to their life or safety, including rape, kidnapping or torture, or were a victim of a severe form of trafficking.
Immigration advocates were quick to hit the Biden administration on the new proposed rule, comparing Biden to his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
“President Biden ran for and won the presidency by pledging to turn the page on the cruelty and chaos of the Trump era and ‘restore the soul of America,’” Douglas Rivlin, communication director for America’s Voice, an immigration rights organization, said in a statement. “It’s hard to reconcile those promises with the details of the proposed asylum ban announced today.”
In the proposal, the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice are also seeking to rescind the Trump-era transit ban and entry ban, saying that unlike the Biden proposal, the Trump administration’s ban “imposed categorical bars on eligibility for asylum and thus conflict with the approach taken in the proposed rule.”
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, said in a statement that the rule “reaches into the dustbin of history to reinstitute one of the most harmful and illegal anti-asylum policies of the Trump administration.”
