Dead-end asylum plan
Republicans spend more time talking about the practical problems posed by the U.S.-Mexico border than any other issue — even as much of what they propose to address them is utter fantasy.
Case in point: Rep. Jim Jordan, who wants to be the next House speaker, is threatening to derail the next round of talks about keeping the government open — unless Democrats agree to restrictions on asylum-seeking that are not just wildly extreme, but would be entirely unworkable even if Democrats were inclined to accept them.
With the government set to run out of funding in mid-November, the Ohio Republican told the congressional tipsheet Punchbowl News that he will inject a new demand into the next round of fiscal talks.
“No money can be used to process or release into the country any new migrants,” Jordan said, referencing the large number of new arrivals that have bedeviled the Biden administration, adding that funding must get a “time out.” This demand will be “non-negotiable,” reports Punchbowl, because Jordan “has no flexibility” with other Republicans on this matter — presumably because to get elected speaker, he has to vow to threaten a shutdown to win concessions from Democrats. But if the administration were barred from using funds for “processing” any migrants, it would seemingly mean officials could not process any migrants’ requests for asylum. The administration must process these requests, because the law requires it: Migrants who ask for asylum after being apprehended on U.S. soil, even ones who entered illegally between ports of entry, must get an official interview.
That generally means migrants are, at minimum, screened by officials to determine if they have a “credible” or “reasonable” fear of facing persecution if returned to home countries. (If they pass, they enter a longer legal process.) It’s unclear how officials could comply with that law if all processing was defunded.
“That would be both illegal and a practical impossibility,” Tom Jawetz, a former senior Department of Homeland Security lawyer, said, adding that administration officials “are legally obligated to process people for asylum on request. It’s not a choice.”
Jordan’s demand for a total defunding of all releases is similarly absurd. Like all past administrations, the Biden administration does release many migrants who are awaiting asylum hearings, especially families. A legal settlement precludes the protracted detention of migrant kids, so detaining families long-term would require separating them — which even President Donald Trump dropped as untenable.
Detaining all migrants awaiting hearings would in fact require an enormous and unprecedented scaling up of detention facilities. “It would mean billions of additional dollars,” says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute.
Meissner notes an irony: Hard-right lawmakers ousted McCarthy for failing to secure deep spending cuts in the last fiscal talks, but now are injecting a demand for mass detentions that “would be entirely at odds with the goal of cutting spending.”
It might be tempting to dismiss Jordan’s clownish demands as posturing. But the House GOP recently passed a wildly extreme bill that would functionally eliminate asylum-seeking. That bill, a nonstarter for President Biden and Senate Democrats, won’t ever become law. But rather than accept this, Jordan is telegraphing plans to wield the threat of another government shutdown to try to compel them to swallow a demand that’s even more extreme.
This demand for concessions to the right of the GOP’s border bill is part of a broader trend: On rhetoric and policy, far-right Republicans are slowly, inexorably shifting the outer boundaries of GOP discourse on immigration into darkly fanciful and even sadistic territory.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, loves saying that migrants bearing drugs across the border should be shot “stone cold dead.” Only 10 years ago, GOP leaders rebuked then-Rep. Steve King of Iowa for denigrating migrant drug runners in far tamer terms. DeSantis’s rendition has earned GOP cheers.
Similarly, businessman and GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to end birthright citizenship for all U.S. children of undocumented immigrants and to deport them. Relative to Republicans who in 2015 proposed ending birthright citizenship without that retroactive element, that’s another rightward lurch.
And Trump recently opined that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Not long ago, right-wing personalities and Republicans who trafficked in “great replacement theory” were careful to describe migrations as merely shifting the political or cultural makeup of the country. Trump has made the ethno-nationalist and potentially white-supremacist implications about blood dilution explicit.
It bears repeating that the border is badly overwhelmed, and that a series of reasonable compromises exists that would help fix the problems there. Instead, as Jordan’s latest threat demonstrates, when it comes to policy, Republicans often treat the border as a kind of fantasy zone — and there is no discernible limit on their prescriptions, no matter how hallucinatory or barbaric.