As a founding member of the Department of Homeland Security, I have witnessed many Executive Orders signed by sitting presidents to be enforced by fellow Homeland Security officers and agents. The most recent executive order signed by President Trump will require asylum seekers to go to a port of entry to apply for asylum. There will be no more applying for asylum after being apprehended by U.S Border Patrol agents trying to sneak through the porous U.S. border.
Asylum seekers are not the same as refugees. Both are searching for a legal way to get into the U.S. But according to the USCIS definition, “refugee status or asylum may be granted to people who have been persecuted or fear they will be persecuted on account of race, religion, nationality, and/or membership in a particular social group or political opinion.” But asylum is claimed inside the U.S., whereas refugee status is when the claimant is outside our border, not at a port.
You cannot legally request asylum unless it is at a port of entry or inside the United States. An application for refugee status, on the other hand, typically happens at a consulate outside of the U.S.
Ports of entry are choke points, and they can be clogged by the nearly 5,000 asylum seekers who have arrived or will soon be arriving in Tijuana. All legal commerce will screech to a halt because those same U.S. officials processing legal entrants will have to deal with asylum seekers. Each asylum claim takes hours to process — hours that the DHS officials need to spend on processing each individual claim.
There is a way to prevent this clog at the U.S. border with asylum claimants. Trump should sign an additional executive order requiring the deployment of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service Asylum Officers to one of ten consulates in Mexico, one consulate in Guatemala, one in Panama, one in Costa Rica, one in Nicaragua, one in Honduras, one in El Salvador, one in Guatemala and one in Belize. That is a total of seventeen locations in Central America alone where officers can vet refugee claims prior to the long trips to U.S. Ports of Entry.
What is the best-case scenario if only asylum seekers go to the ports? Twenty asylum seekers processed a day per port adjacent to Tijuana — the Otay Mesa and San Ysidro ports. The choke will only get worse if thousands of additional asylum seekers push north from Central and South America to the United States.
There is another solution to a complex problem: A “Port Court.” Trump should deploy asylum officers and immigration judges to each port of entry for expedited asylum review. Applicants can make appointments, wait in Mexico, and go to Immigration Court on their assigned date. In a “Port Court” the applicant will have the same evidence they would have in Mexico to claim asylum as they would in the U.S.
The immigration system has been broken and exploited for decades upon decades. There is no simple fix. A divided Congress will never pass new laws. A quick and simple fix is to process legitimate claims at the border, specifically at the ports of entry.
Think of it like a 24/7 court system. The claimant presents their case for adjudication to an asylum officer, is seen by an immigration judge and processed; all in the same day. An appeal is processed in the same way.
Our broken immigration system needs to be fixed by bipartisan immigration reform, but that is not likely anytime soon. So until that happens, let’s fix the problem at the ground level. Process the claims on site and efficiently. Let the legitimate claimants into to the U.S., and decline the meritless ones.
Dr. Jason Piccolo is a former Supervisor with the Department of Homeland Security, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and nationally recognized whistleblower for the 2015 release of unaccompanied alien children to criminal sponsors.
