Feigned Immigration Enforcement
DHS and DOJ plan to transform a Trump administration asylum regulation from a roadblock to illegal migration into an integral part of Biden’s migrant shuttle bus
By George Fishman on March 2, 2023
On February 23, the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice published a proposed rule titled “Circumvention of Lawful Pathways” — let’s say “CLAP” for short. This regulation has been portrayed by advocacy groups as an inglorious and surprising return to Trump-era immigration restrictions by the Biden administration. For instance, Human Rights Watch proclaims that:
US President Biden has once again turned to ineffective and deadly deterrence policies .., proposing a rule ... that rights groups have labeled an “asylum ban” due to its unconscionable narrowing of access to protection. ... Biden’s new rule [includes] a version of former President Donald Trump’s “third country transit ban” — a policy Biden once campaigned against.
And the ACLU trumpets:
[The rule] will unlawfully deny asylum to people at the southern border [and] … force people to seek asylum and wait for an answer in Mexico or another country they passed through, unless they are granted a date and time to apply [at a port-of-entry]. ... The rule mimics illegal Trump asylum bans that were halted by the courts after ACLU lawsuits.
...
Anu Joshi, deputy director of [our] National Political Advocacy Department [states that] “This asylum ban is, at its core, Trump’s asylum ban under a different name. It will leave the most vulnerable people in much the same position as Trump’s policy did — at risk and unfairly denied the protection of asylum for reasons that have nothing to do with their need for refuge. We can’t overstate the human suffering that will result.”
I don’t think that these groups are gaslighting per se, I just think they live in an alternate reality. As my colleague Elizabeth Jacobs concludes, the CLAP rule is “so fraught with exceptions and loopholes that the general public should expect few prospective migrants to actually be deterred”. The late, great Trump administration regulation (which, in full disclosure, I worked on as a deputy general counsel at DHS) would actually have helped curtail the border crisis (had it not been wrongly enjoined by a federal court). The current regulation, rather, is designed to simply further President Biden’s stratagem of, as I have written: “conscript[ing] parole to fulfill his agenda of, as Mark Krikorian, the Center for Immigration Studies’ executive director, has observed, stigma removal, the conversion of as much of the population of illegally entering economic migrants as it can into people supposedly fleeing persecution or violence or harm of one sort or another”. As a result, as I wrote, “[t]his could justify (at least in the administration’s own mind) the abandonment of any semblance of immigration law enforcement as a goal, replaced with, in DHS Secretary Mayorkas’ words, ‘safe, orderly, humane, and lawful pathways for migration’”.
https://cis.org/Fishman/Feigned-Immigration-Enforcement
