WaPo Editorial Board: The U.S. is slamming the door on asylum seekers

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

The U.S. is slamming the door on asylum seekers

By Editorial Board July 15 at 7:36 PM

GIVEN THAT President Trump would like to exile members of Congress who strike him as a little too alien, it may not come as a surprise that he is prepared to take extraordinary steps to send actual foreign asylum seekers packing. Still, the administration caught most of the world by surprise with its sudden announcement Monday that it would shift decades of established procedure by barring protections for most people who cross the southern border.

The new rule, unveiled jointly by the Justice and Homeland Security departments to take effect Tuesday, aims directly at people fleeing the three countries — Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — that are the source of most asylum seekers who have crossed into the United States in recent months. That spike in migration, and the burden it has imposed on U.S. Border Patrol officers and other agencies, was the main justification for the rule change cited by Attorney General William P. Barr.

It was telling that Mr. Barr made no serious attempt to provide legal justification for the new policy; it seems likely that no persuasive one exists. U.S. and international law are clear that refugees who enter the United States are entitled to apply for asylum here, regardless of their odds of success (which lately are less than 20 percent). The American Civil Liberties Union said it would file suit immediately to block the change. Already, courts have struck down the administration’s attempt to prohibit migrants from applying for asylum unless they cross the border at official ports of entry.

In Mr. Trump’s perfect world, asylum seekers and refugees would have no place in the United States, with the possible exception of Norwegians. That thinking explains why the administration has tried desperately to finalize agreements with Mexico and Guatemala that would force Salvadorans or Hondurans to apply for asylum in Guatemala, and Guatemalans to seek protections in Mexico. Both countries would thus function as protective screens for their vastly bigger and more powerful neighbor to the north; never mind that neither is plausibly very safe for migrants, nor that neither has the administrative or economic wherewithal to absorb a significant influx.

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-is-slamming-the-door-on-asylum-seekers/2019/07/15/98a2ed26-a746-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Remember when the US granted asylum to refugee scientists from Hitler's Germany ...

... and they developed the nuclear reactor, the atomic bomb, and the hydrogen bomb -- then went on to win a string of Nobel prizes ? Remember when the US accepted postwar refugees from Germany -- and they built the rockets that took us to the moon ? Remember when the US granted asylum to refugees from the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries -- and they revealed priceless strategic information about the inner workings of the Soviet apparatus ?

I guess we were just lucky they were white, or people like 45 would have sent them all back.