Door slams shut

In the vacuum left by a hopeless Congress, the Trump administration is dramatically reshaping our nation’s immigration rules. On Monday, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a ruling with the potential to unravel the country’s asylum system as we know it.

Sessions’ decision overrules a 2014 ruling about a Salvadoran woman who fled to the U.S. with her three children to escape an abusive husband. It also reverses years of established precedent and affects tens of thousands of cases.

Sessions asserted that there are no legal grounds for almost all victims of domestic violence and gang violence to claim asylum. These two difficult and multifaceted crimes have caused large numbers of asylum seekers, especially from Central America, to flee to the U.S. over the past decade. Experts believe the sudden change could affect between 60 and 70 percent of asylum jurisprudence.

Sessions’ remarkable decision injects a new strain of cruelty into the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies.

Already, the administration’s cutbacks on the number of admitted refugees have resulted in a dramatic reduction of desperate people who are allowed to resettle in this country in general, and California in particular.

The administration’s new policy to criminally prosecute all adults caught crossing into the U.S. illegally — a policy that has resulted in horrible stories of ICE agents ripping children away from their parents — is morally bankrupt and has proved to be a chaos agent at the border.

Now, Sessions is denying protections to abused women and children fleeing gang violence.

Regulating immigration is the duty of Congress. For decades, it has been derelict in this duty. The Trump administration is taking advantage of this failure to push extreme policies that will destroy families and lead to great harm. It has to stop.