Who Will Be in Charge of Asylum?
Not judges, but the very same asylum officers who were ‘physically sickened’ by the Trump administration’s ‘supervillain plan’ to secure the border
By George Fishman on April 1, 2022
It is expected that the Biden administration will require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to cease carrying out its responsibilities under Title 42 to expel illegal aliens apprehended at the border, as it has been doing since March 2020 in response to the Covid pandemic. As my colleague Andrew Arthur notes, even the administration acknowledges that the inevitable result will be a massive surge at the border of likely unprecedented proportions (absent a pedal-to-the-metal resumption of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP)).
To add insult to injury, the Biden administration is coupling this imminent self-inflicted catastrophe with a new rule that, as Arthur and Rob Law warn, will “remove several crucial safeguards put in place to ensure that asylum grants [to illegal aliens apprehended at the border] are not subject to fraud and abuse.” The inevitable result as I see it is that an unprecedented proportion of these illegal border-crossers will be magically transformed into “refugees”, legalized, and showered with more federal welfare benefits than even most legal permanent residents could hope for.
The rule will, in addition to repealing many of the asylum reforms put in place by the Trump administration, put U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “asylum officers” (AOs), rather than Department of Justice (DOJ) immigration judges (IJs), in charge of granting asylum to illegal aliens apprehended at the border and placed into expedited removal. As Arthur and Law argue:
https://cis.org/Fishman/Who-Will-Be-Charge-Asylum
