LIN • Trump has weaponized asylum, hurting the innocent

These are the people whose own government is a bad actor or fails to protect them. The principles of U.S. asylum law have remained unchanged since World War II and have been among the toughest in the world. Just because you come from a country in disarray does not mean you automatically get asylum; approval rates are low because the legal standard is so high.

The U.S. asylum law’s constancy eroded with the Trump administration’s concerted efforts to chip away at the longheld legal precedent of allowing asylum seekers to enter our nation.

I look at these asylum seekers in Mexico and wonder how a policy like this would have impacted my mother if it existed in Hong Kong when she fled during World War II, at the age of 2, with my grandmother and uncle, then a year old, from China. My grandfather fought against the Communists, but the Nationalists were losing the civil war. Hong Kong, under British rule, opened its borders to Chinese asylum seekers for limited periods of time daily. My grandmother always said, “If you did not make it into Hong Kong before they shut the border again, then you likely were fated to be captured and harmed by the Communist Chinese.”

The lessons learned from World War II and our country’s attempts to prevent future atrocities are being ignored and even destroyed by the actions of this administration. Not only have we repeated history by preventing asylum seekers to plead their case inside the U.S., we have refused a whole category of people from the possibility of safety much like we did when we turned those ships of Jewish people around and sent them back to their fate in Nazi Germany. This administration’s actions dim the beacon of hope so symbolically embodied by Lady Liberty and illuminated by Lazurus’ poem. My only hope is that Americans, aware of the erosion of our melting pot, push against the political weaponization of asylum law and return to a reverence of our contract to the international community and humanity that the least of us deserves the most of our collective protections.