The pandemic has added one more insurmountable hurdle for asylum seekers.
President Trump has taken advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to finally achieve his goal of foreclosing asylum for migrants fleeing violence in Central America and Mexico.
Two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security (purportedly at the direction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) announced that it would bar entry to all migrants crossing the southern border in order to limit the spread of the coronavirus. Migrants arrested at the border without documents would be quickly repatriated to their countries of origin. Simultaneously, the United States and Mexican officials mutually determined that non-essential travel between the two countries would be halted indefinitely. The Department of Health and Human Services, which is responsible for unaccompanied migrant children also announced that children were being quickly returned to their home countries on a “case by case basis,” rather than being admitted and considered for asylum in the United States.
And in addition to closing the Mexican border to nonessential traffic, the United States has shut off access for anyone trying to claim asylum at the border. This includes more than 60,000 asylum seekers who have been forced to remain in Mexico under MPP (Migrant Protection Protocols) in dangerous conditions along the southern border. Now the people who were about to go before a judge to make their case – after waiting for months in crowded and unsanitary refugee camps – have been told that their hearings are postponed until at least May 1.
The Trump administration has been single-minded in its goal to eliminate asylum. In the final year of the Obama administration (fiscal year 2017), 120,815 asylum applications were filed in immigration courts by individuals facing deportation. In the first year of the Trump administration, the number fell to 110,469–an immediate signal that fewer migrants were able to seek asylum. By the end of 2018, immigration courts were denying asylum to 75 percent of applicants under guidance of the attorney general, compared to about 55 percent denials during the Obama era. Even before the coronavirus-related guidelines, the Trump administration’s efforts at the border and new guidelines on gang and domestic violence made it effectively impossible for asylum seekers to succeed in the United States.
Over the years, the administration has created a byzantine tangle of rules that worked in tandem to discourage migrants, put them in danger, and find reasons to turn them away.
Read this full story in Slate here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/trump-asylum-coronavirus.html?via=homepage_taps_top