New asylum rule goes into effect
Policy denies asylum to most
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico — A new level of despair spread among tens of thousands of migrants waiting on the Mexican border to seek refuge in the U.S. as the Trump administration began enforcing radical new restrictions Thursday on who qualifies for asylum.
“The United States is the only option,” Dunea Romero, a 31-year-old Honduran, lamented at a border crossing in Tijuana. She said she packed a bag and fled her homeland with her two boys, ages 7 and 11, after learning that her ex-husband, a powerful gang leader, was going to have her killed.
The new U.S. policy would deny asylum to nearly all migrants arriving at the southern border who aren’t from Mexico. It would disallow anyone who passes through another country without first seeking and failing to obtain asylum there.
The rule will fall most heavily on Central Americans, mainly Hondurans and Guatemalans, because they account for most people arrested or stopped at the border. But it also represents an enormous setback for other asylum seekers around the world, including large numbers of Africans, Haitians and Cubans who try to enter the U.S. via the Mexican border.
It is perhaps the biggest change to U.S. asylum policy since it was established in 1980 and the most consequential move of President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, a signature issue as he heads into a reelection campaign.
The Trump administration put the policy into effect the morning after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared it to do so while legal challenges move forward.
Acting U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan called the high court’s go-ahead a “big victory” in the administration’s effort to curb the flow of migrants. Migrants and their advocates decried it as tantamount to a death sentence for many of those fleeing poverty and violence in their homelands.
Jessica Collins, a spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that handles asylum cases, said it will be retroactive to July 16, when it was announced.
Collins said it will lead to “fewer individuals transiting through Mexico on a dangerous journey.”
More than 40,000 asylum seekers have been forced to wait in Mexico while their cases wind through clogged U.S. immigration courts under another Trump administration policy, introduced in January.
In Tijuana on Thursday, 28-year-old Ngoh Elliot Takere of Cameroon stood mere steps from the U.S., frustrated after learning that he could be blocked from getting in. He has been waiting for two months in Mexico for his number to be called so he can submit a request for asylum.
The 28-year-old furniture maker said he left his wartorn African homeland after being jailed by police for being part of the English-speaking minority. He was released on condition that he leave the country or be killed, he said.
He said the military burned his family’s home, killing his mother as she slept.
As for the possibility of being turned away by the United States, Takere said: “I can’t think of that.”