Make U.S. decent again

Asylum rules are a mess. The Biden administration must fix them.

As the COVID -19 pandemic was taking hold in the United States, former President Donald Trump seized the opportunity to weaponize it in his war on immigrants.

The Biden administration is still trying to fix this humanitarian disaster, and, sadly, doing a poor job of it.

In an example of Mr. Trump’s antiimmigration obsession, his the administration in March 2020 moved quickly and efficiently — unusually so, given its otherwise flailing response to the pandemic — to invoke a public health law known as Title 42 to refuse entry by people seeking asylum. The administration’s story — not an implausible one, to be sure — was that the country had to protect itself by banning entry of people who might have a communicable disease.

Here we are, though, more than two years later, and this indecent restriction on asylum seekers is still in place, having been invoked 1.9 million times. Even as it was lifting entry restrictions for all sorts of other travelers, the administration sought to keep applying Title 42 to asylum seekers. And when it signaled plans recently to end the policy after criticism from immigrant advocacy and civil liberties groups, it faced pushback from 24 states, led by Arizona and Louisiana.

That battle is now in court, where the Biden administration, which had promised to end the inhumane immigration policies and practices of the Trump era, is doing a disappointingly awful job. On Friday, a federal judge in Louisiana blocked plans to lift the restrictions this week, finding that the government failed to follow administrative procedures requiring public notice and time to gather public comment — steps that any competent government would not overlook or bypass.

With the virus resurging, we are not against ensuring that people entering the country are not bringing the contagion with them. That’s the point of Title 42, going back to its origins in 1944 as part of the Public Health Service Act to guard against returning U.S. servicepeople bringing diseases with them. But it was not instituted to broadly keep people out of the country; it was established to ensure that people were screened and, if necessary, quarantined.

Mr. Biden recently made an exception for people fleeing the war between Ukraine and Russia. But the cruel corruption of public health law by Mr. Trump and Stephen Miller, his senior adviser, still applies to asylum seekers from violenceplagued nations like Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

More than half a million people a day enter the U.S. by air, sea and land. Our government has the means to ensure they are vaccinated and tested for COVID -19. The government has the resources to screen and test people who come unexpectedly and in desperate straits, like asylum seekers. It has access to plenty of vaccines. There is no reason why, after 16 months in office, this new administration is still running things much as the old one did.