Embarrassed by images of illegal border crossers overwhelming the social safety nets of major Democratic cities — Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., among others — President Joe Biden is implementing a major change to the nation’s asylum process that his administration claims will help fix the crisis. Unfortunately, Biden’s new asylum officer rule will only make the situation worse.
At first blush, Biden’s new plan sounds like a decent idea. One major reason immigrants have been able to exploit the existing asylum system is that there are not enough judges to handle the cases of all 1.5 million illegal immigrants whom Biden has released into the U.S. interior since he became president.
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Under Biden’s plan, asylum officers from the Department of Homeland Security who initially conduct “credible fear” interviews with immigrants arrested for illegally crossing the border would be granted the power to give those immigrants asylum status. In theory, this could significantly reduce the backlog of 1.9 million cases facing the nation’s immigration judges.
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Setting aside the legality of Biden’s plan for a moment — and it is totally illegal — practically speaking, it has a fatal logistical flaw. Under Biden’s plan, asylum officers are only empowered to grant asylum. If an asylum officer determines that an immigrant arrested for illegally crossing the border does not qualify for asylum, then that determination is automatically appealed to an immigration judge. So it’s a one-way ratchet for ramping up grants of asylum.
Also, proceedings in front of an immigration judge are inherently different from interviews with an asylum officer. In immigration court, immigrants who claim asylum have lawyers, and the people of the United States are represented by a prosecutor. It is an adversarial process designed to protect the rights of both the immigrant and the people. When an asylum officer interviews an immigrant, however, it is not an adversarial process. The officer is not necessarily looking to poke holes or detect inconsistencies in an immigrant’s story. This is a recipe for fraud. Additionally, asylum officers receive just five weeks of training, whereas immigration judges complete three years of law school and pass a bar exam.
This is why Congress specifically granted Justice Department immigration judges, not DHS asylum officers, the power to adjudicate asylum claims. Biden’s asylum officer rule is illegal because it transfers the power to grant asylum to a completely different department and its employees without congressional authorization.
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The current crisis at the southern border is not being caused by some sudden surge in global migration. Venezuela has been a socialist basket case for almost a decade, and Cuba has been a communist dystopia for much longer. There is a very specific reason these immigrants are only coming here now, and that is Biden’s catch-and-release policy at the southern border. He has made it easy for immigrants who cross the southern border illegally to achieve near-permanent residency just by claiming asylum status, usually without merit.
This new plan to make asylum even easier will only make the current crisis worse. If Biden wants to end the border crisis he created and stop adding to the backlog of asylum cases, he needs to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s successful “Remain in Mexico” policy.
