The migrant caravan and a manufactured crisis
By Jonathan Blitzer
12:00 P.M.
... On Friday, he signed a Presidential proclamation (“Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States”), which suspended the possibility of asylum for anyone entering the country between officially designated ports of entry. By U.S. and international law, migrants are allowed to seek asylum “whether or not” they do so at an official checkpoint along the border; Trump’s measure, which was immediately challenged by advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, aims to override explicit provisions of an existing federal statute in order to thwart the entry of tens of thousands of Central American migrants. As Lee Gelernt, the A.C.L.U.’s lead litigator in the case, told me, “It would mean the President could literally sit down with a copy of the immigration act that Congress wrote and cross out any provision he didn’t like” ...
... Although migration to the U.S. is still significantly lower than it was two decades ago, the number of people applying for asylum is on the rise, and hard-liners in the Trump Administration claim, in the face of conflicting evidence, that families are gaming the system by entering the country to pursue asylum and then disappearing before their immigration cases come before a judge. “This enrages the Miller cabal,” a former Trump Administration official told me, referring to the President’s senior adviser Stephen Miller. “Miller knows there’s only so much the U.S. can do without changing or limiting those who can claim asylum.” For the past several months, in open violation of international law, Customs and Border Protection has been turning away asylum seekers at official ports of entry, from San Diego to McAllen, Texas, claiming that migrants would have to wait in Mexico until there was enough space to process them. Meanwhile, the President’s proclamation last week lacked any commitment to increase resources at ports of entry to deal with the heightened traffic ...
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trump-the-migrant-caravan-and-a-manufactured-crisis-at-the-us-border
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