“The rule challenged here attempts to resuscitate and combine the illegal features of the two previous asylum bans that this Court and the Ninth Circuit found to be unlawful,” the plaintiffs stated. “This new rule is no less illegal or harmful. It will effectively eliminate asylum for nearly all non-Mexican asylum seekers who enter between designated ports of entry, and even for those who present at a port without first securing an appointment.”
The suit asks the court to permanently block the government from endorsing the restrictions and declare the restrictions illegal.
The defendants are Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“This rule seeks to incentivize migrants to use lawful pathways instead of taking the dangerous journey to unlawfully cross the southern border,” a DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “This rule responds to the elevated encounters we are experiencing at the border and is critical to creating an orderly process to seek protection in the United States at a time when Congress refuses to reform our broken immigration laws or provide the necessary funds to hire sufficient asylum officers and immigration judges to process claims in a timely manner.”
CBP declined to comment.
New Rule
Federal law enables immigrants to claim asylum or a fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group if they return to their home country. To be granted asylum, immigrants must come from a country that is unwilling or unable to protect them from persecution. Most claims are denied, with adjudicators ruling that they don’t meet the criteria.Asylum-seekers can seek asylum even after entering the United States illegally, a practice at which the Biden administration’s restrictions take aim.
The new restrictions, contained in a final rule, automatically reject asylum claims unless they come from immigrants who got an appointment and presented themselves at a port of entry or an official crossing, immigrants who applied for asylum in a country through which they traveled and were denied, and immigrants who received permission from U.S. authorities to travel to the United States.
The only exceptions are for immigrants who experience “exceptionally compelling circumstances” such as an “acute medical emergency” and those who go to a port of entry without an appointment. The latter must show that they couldn’t use a new application, called CBP One, for some reason, a language barrier being one such reason.
The rule “presumes those who do not use lawful pathways to enter the United States are ineligible for asylum and allows the United States to remove individuals who do not establish a reasonable fear of persecution or torture in the country of removal,” according to a joint statement from DHS and the Department of Justice.
Blocked by Courts
When implemented during the Trump administration, the restrictions were blocked in court.A judge found that the restrictions on immigrants who didn’t present at ports of entry didn’t comply with a federal law that largely requires agencies to provide time for public comments before enacting new policies. The ruling was upheld by higher courts, including the Supreme Court.
An asylum ban on immigrants who traveled through another country was in place for about a year after the nation’s top court lifted a preliminary injunction. According to government data, it led to a jump in rejections of asylum applications.
The ban was ultimately ruled to be in violation of U.S. law.
The rulings mean the restrictions haven’t been in place for years.
Although the Biden administration is portraying the new restrictions as different, they’re actually renewing the blocked restrictions, plaintiffs in the new case said.
“The rule operates just as the Trump administration’s prior asylum bans did: Asylum seekers subject to the rule—all non-Mexicans—are categorically barred unless they satisfy one of the enumerated and limited conditions or exceptions. That’s a simple ban with narrow exemptions, and it turns the asylum process on its head,” the suit stated.
The plaintiffs are all nonprofits that assist asylum seekers, including some who “could not have sought asylum in transit.”
“The Biden administration’s new ban places vulnerable asylum seekers in grave danger and violates U.S. asylum laws. We’ve been down this road before with Trump,” Katrina Eiland, a managing attorney with the ACLU, said in a statement. “The asylum bans were cruel and illegal then, and nothing has changed now.”
