The number of non-Americans who claimed asylum increased 1,750 percent during former President Barack Obama’s administration, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon.
“We have seen a 1,750 percent increase in the number of fear claims being made in the expedited removal process between FY 2008 and FY 2016,” Director L. Francis Cissna told the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security.
Cissna, whose Department of Homeland Security agency oversees applicants from those who request admittance to the U.S. because of persecution back home, said the number of new asylum claims tripled from fiscal year 2014 to 2017.
The number received from Oct. 1, 2016, through Sept. 30, 2017, was the highest annual number of asylum claims received in more than two decades.
Cissna said the steep increase is hurting “true asylum seekers” whose claims cannot be heard because of the hundreds of thousands of applicants also vying for consideration.
“The way the system works right now the threshold under law is so low that about 80 percent pass that initial interview, but only 20 percent are granted asylum by a judge, which tells us that 80 percent of that is either just a flat-out fraud or somebody who thinks they can come here because they want a job here. That’s not asylum. Or ‘I want to reunify with my family.’ That’s not asylum. ‘I just want to come to the United States’ — not asylum,” DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told Fox News last week.
The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review released data last Wednesday that shows it had 697,777 cases on the docket as of March 31, the halfway point of fiscal year 2018.
Cissna said legal loopholes — “insufficient funding for detention space, court decisions that prevent us from detaining fear claimants throughout the process of adjudicating fear claims, and an overburdened immigration court system tasked with dealing with those claims” — has created the perfect storm that border security alone cannot fix because it does not address enticing factors.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced in early May that he had approved the relocation of 35 assistant U.S. attorneys to the border to handle prosecutions. EOIR sent additional immigration judges to oversee the cases.
Sessions said the change was meant to send a message to people attempting to claim credible fear that the U.S. would punish anyone who knowingly lied in order to enter the country.
