Trump official: Asylum changes will drive down backlog

WASHINGTON — A top Trump administration immigration official defended the effort to effectively end asylum at the U.S.Mexico border for nearly all migrants, saying Friday it was necessary to drive down a massive backlog of immigration cases.

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, told The Associated Press Friday that the Supreme Court’s decision this week to allow sweeping regulations to take effect while litigation continued was a big win for the government.

“There’s no underselling it,” he said.

The new policy will deny asylum to nearly all migrants arriving at the southern border who aren’t from Mexico because it disallows anyone who passes through another country without first seeking and failing to obtain asylum there. While officials say it’s a crucial effort to help ease strain on the system, it’s also a potentially potent deterrent.

The rule falls most heavily on Central Americans, mainly Hondurans and Guatemalans, because they account for most people arrested or stopped at the border.

Juan Carlos Perla, 36, said Friday that many asylum seekers from his native El Salvador have returned, including cousins who have stayed with him in a rented tworoom house with donated furniture on the distant outskirts of Tijuana.

“People know that they aren’t going to be allowed in. They’re desperate. Many don’t like it here. Life here isn’t easy,” he said.

But it’s also an enormous setback for other asylum seekers, including many Africans, Haitians and Cubans who try to enter the United States via Mexico.

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.

Critics have accused the administration of callously closing the door on people fleeing persecution and abandoning America’s humanitarian tradition.

Many of the officials who make determinations on asylum claims believe the new regulations are wrong, according to Michael Knowles, an asylum officer and spokesman for the AFGE National CIS Council 119, which represents asylum officers.

“You’re asking us to do something that we believe is unethical at best and illegal — if not an egregious human rights abuse at worst. It creates a moral dilemma for asylum officers because they are made to feel individually complicit in that abuse,” he said.

Avril Benoit, executive director of Doctors Without Borders, said the regulations guarantee vulnerable people will be exploited, forced to wait “in overcrowded shelters or on the street in unsafe cities along the U.S.Mexico border where they are targeted for robbery, extortion, and kidnapping.”