The Trump administration has spent much of the last two years making it tougher and tougher for people to enter the United States and claim asylum; on Friday, the president is expected to sign a directive further limiting their ability to seek asylum at the southwest border.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
According to the directive, U.S. officials will require asylum seekers to go to a point of entry along the border and make a claim for asylum, which would bar those who cross illegally. Currently, migrants who cross the border into the U.S. have up to a year to request asylum, regardless of how they got here.
The argument being made by the administration is that this change will enable safer, more orderly processing and better resource planning, an official said.
Currently, asylum seekers are allowed to make a “credible fear” claim—that they are fleeing a form of persecution or violence—and can live in the United States as they await a hearing. But Trump has said that he wants to keep migrants in detention until the hearings, which could result in indefinite detentions. According to Politico, the Homeland Security Department met on Wednesday to discuss the possibility of limiting the rights of asylum seekers at the border as well:
The group weighed restricting the ability of people caught between ports of entry to make a “credible fear” claim, the first step in an asylum application, the official said. Another option would be to apply a different credible fear standard to those migrants.
This directive would come days after Trump sent thousands of troops to the border, weeks after he reintroduced the idea of ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, and months after his administration forcibly separated thousands of migrant families and sparking a humanitarian crisis that is still playing out at this very moment. This executive order, like the others before it, has only one intention: to create misery while engineering a whiter America. He has a real talent for it.