Biden administration issues rule to accelerate asylum process at US-Mexico border

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Biden administration issues rule to accelerate asylum process at US-Mexico border

Cobi Burnett | U. Nevada Las Vegas School of Law, US

March 25, 2022 09:50:07 am

The Biden administration Thursday issued a new asylum processing regulation in efforts to accelerate the asylum and deportation process at the US-Mexico border.

This regulation is in response to the record influx of migrants seeking entrance to the US. The final asylum rule, still unpublished, will go into effect in late May or early June of this year. The final rule has not been substantially altered from its initial proposal in August 2021.

The policy will begin to allow border officers to either accept or reject migrants’ claims for protection once they cross over the border. This will essentially accelerate the process by allowing migrants to skip the US immigration courts, where their cases are consistently backlogged for years at a time. The immigration courts, at the end of February, had more than 670,000 pending cases.

Instead, migrants will have their entrance claims heard by asylum officers. The majority of migrants come from Mexico and Central America, but in recent years migrants have been traced back to further reaches of the world. This most notably includes migrants fleeing from Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion.

The Department of Homeland Security, which is issuing the new rule jointly with the Department of Justice, has been outspoken against the current handling of the asylum system for years. The departments have hope that the process will provide an “expedited removal” in order to resolve cases quicker and more effectively. An official within the US Citizenship and Immigration Services department explained that the process will be gradually put together and will initially start with a small number of migrants. Currently, border officials have been detaining more than 13,000 undocumented immigrants per day.

The idea is that by adding less cases to the immigration court docket, the backlog of asylum cases, which currently account for 40 percent of all backlogged cases, will be drastically reduced. While the new rule aims to speed up this process and limit the hurdles placed on migrants, immigration advocates have their concerns as well.

In addition to this new policy, the Biden administration has hopes to also repeal the controversial Title 42 order, initiated by former President Donald Trump. The order allowed border authorities to expel migrants crossing the border to Mexico and other countries in an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.