Trump moves to restrict asylum claims at the border
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced a major new effort to restrict people from claiming asylum at the U.S. border, setting up a legal battle over the president’s authority over immigration.
The announcement Thursday came hours after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against President Trump in another highprofile immigration dispute, involving treatment of the so-called Dreamers, young people brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Immigrant rights groups promised to challenge the new asylum rules as soon as they go into effect, calling them a clear violation of U.S. law.
Administration officials expect both cases to be headed to the Supreme Court this spring. That would test the willingness of the court’s newly reinforced conservative majority to back up the president on his signature issue.
The new asylum rules, the latest salvo in Trump’s effort to shut off the flow of people, mostly from Central America, crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, aims to bar tens of thousands of claims for refuge filed each year.
The rules would seek to deny asylum to the vast majority of those who cross the border illegally rather than at a designated port of entry.
About 97,000 people in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30
claimed they had a “credible fear of persecution” — the legal test for asylum — and surrendered to the Border Patrol, according to government statistics. Most did not enter at the official entry ports, which in the last year have often had huge backlogs.
Although most eventually lose their asylum claims and are deported, about 6,000 people in the last year won asylum cases.
The 9th Circuit ruling involves the fate of nearly 700,000 young people who have been shielded from deportation by an Obama-era program known as DACA, for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
Trump has been trying for more than a year to end DACA, despite claiming sympathy for the young people involved. He has repeatedly been stymied in court. The latest ruling marked the first time that an appeals court has ruled on the issue.
The 3-0 ruling, in a case brought by the University of California on behalf of students covered by DACA, upheld a federal judge’s decision in January that halted Trump’s order. Issuing a nationwide decree, the judge said the administration failed to set out a legitimate reason for revoking the Dreamers’ shield.
In his announcement last year, Trump said he was ending DACA because thenAtty. Gen. Jeff Sessions determined that President Obama had exceeded his authority in setting up the program. The appeals court said Sessions was wrong.
Obama’s order was “a permissible exercise of executive discretion” that allowed the Department of Homeland Security to “devote much-needed resources to enforcement priorities such as threats to national security, rather than blameless and economically productive young people with clean criminal records,” appeals court Judges Kim McLane Wardlaw, Jacqueline H. Nguyen and John B. Owens wrote.
Trump ultimately could rescind DACA, but the decision cannot rest “solely on an erroneous legal premise,” they added. All three judges are Democratic appointees.
Although the administration lost in court, its lawyers will be happy to have a ruling. They’ve been eager to get the issue before the Supreme Court, where they are confident they will win.
The president has also been looking forward to a Supreme Court test of DACA. Asked at his news conference Wednesday whether he thought that the administration and Congress could work out a deal on the issue, he said that would come only after court action.
“We could have done some pretty good work on DACA,” he said. “But a judge ruled that DACA was OK. Had the judge not ruled that way, I think we could have made a deal. Once the judge ruled that way, the Democrats didn’t want to talk anymore. So we’ll see how it works out at the Supreme Court.”
If the court follows its normal schedule, the justices could grant the administration’s appeal on the issue in January, hear arguments in April and issue a ruling by late June.
By then, the justices could also be facing a test of the administration’s new asylum rules.
Under U.S. law, anyone who claims a credible fear of being persecuted in his or her home country has a right to an asylum hearing. Those who ultimately are granted asylum can live and work in the U.S. legally.
Trump has made the asylum system a central political issue, claiming repeatedly this fall that a caravan of thousands of migrants from Central America are forming an “invasion” of the U.S. He has suggested, without evidence, that some might be terrorists.
Reporters who have traveled with the caravan have found thousands of bedraggled people, many of them women and children, fleeing violence and other dire conditions in their home countries.
Administration officials have been telling reporters that they expect legal challenges to the new rules and that while they might lose cases in the lower courts, they expect the Supreme Court to rule on their side.
In a joint statement Thursday, acting Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitaker and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen cited the same legal authority for clamping down on asylum claims that Trump relied on for his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim countries.
“The president has the broad authority to suspend or restrict the entry of aliens into the United States if he determines it to be in the national interest to do so,” the statement said. “Our asylum system is overwhelmed with too many meritless asylum claims from aliens who place a tremendous burden on our resources, preventing us from being able to expeditiously grant asylum to those who truly deserve it.”
The new rules are expected to take effect Friday after an official proclamation by Trump, officials said.
Currently, those who claim asylum outside ports of entry are interviewed by an asylum officer and released with a court date if they’re determined to have a credible fear of persecution.
Under the new rules, people caught crossing illegally will still have the right to claim asylum but will be given a negative determination in most cases unless they can show they are victims of torture or meet a higher standard for proving persecution. They can then be scheduled for removal from the country within 20 days.
Asylum applicants will still have a right to an appeal, according to an administration official who was not authorized to speak about the policy on the record. That could allow some to receive asylum, but officials expect the vast majority will be deported.
Adults arriving alone will be prosecuted for illegal crossing, the official said. That’s a misdemeanor for which the sentence is typically time already served awaiting trial. Adults who are caught crossing with children will not be prosecuted, but will also receive a negative decision on most asylum claims, officials said.