End of the road

For at least 53 migrants from Mexico and Central America, a dream of a better life and personal safety in the United States ended horrifically inside a tractor-trailer on the side of a San Antonio street. While the incident is still being investigated, it’s clear that those most directly responsible are the unscrupulous smugglers who left them to their deaths in the dark and sweltering heat, surely after taking what little they were able to pay, and the transnational criminal networks that abet and profit from these smugglers. The authorities should use all available investigative tools to hold these slugs accountable.

Yet the web of culpability extends further, reaching all the way to Washington, where decisions made over the past years have constrained the asylum system to the point where many migrants — who want nothing more than to reach safety through the legal humanitarian migration pathways that are supposed to exist — see themselves forced to choose between a return to danger and a treacherous attempt to sneak in.

When Congress designed the “credible fear” standard, the first step in an asylum application, it deliberately made it a low bar to clear. It understood that the fuller process would weed out invalid claims, but it was important not to turn away people who might have a legitimate claim and for whom the U.S. could be a refuge.

That principle was jettisoned by the Trump and early Biden administrations, aided by a federal judiciary that has accepted bogus arguments against it. Today, the Supreme Court could well deal another blow by forcing the government to maintain, perhaps permanently, a radical Trump-era program to force asylum seekers to wait for their U.S. asylum processes in Mexico, where they have difficulty finding lawyers and are often victimized by criminal gangs.

Each additional blow to the legal asylum system drives more migrants into the waiting arms of smugglers and their semis. We must reverse course before the next gruesome discovery on the side of a road.