BIDEN CAN FIX U.S. ASYLUM, FIRST THINGS FIRST

The cruelty with which would-be immigrants and asylum-seekers were often treated at the U.S. border was a feature, not a bug, of immigration policies with President Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump and many of his appointees essentially rejected U.S. laws that dictated asylum should be provided to those who legitimately feared they faced persecution and abusive treatment in their home countries because of their race, religion, nationality, political views or membership in a “particular social group” such as the LGBTQ+ community.

When Joe Biden took over as president in January 2021, the cruel posturing disappeared.

Biden quickly won kudos for ending Trump’s policy of turning away asylum-seeking minors, leading to much improved treatment of young migrants. Biden also won praise after his administration unveiled a plan to increase legal immigration and to simplify related bureaucratic procedures.

Unfortunately, 14 months into his presidency, Biden’s handling of a key aspect of immigration policy has become increasingly confusing and arbitrary to the point it can seem downright unfair.

The biggest issue: To the shock of human rights groups, Biden has retained a Trump policy known as Title 42 that was adopted in March 2020. It gives border agents the authority to immediately expel migrant families caught crossing the border back to Mexico or their home countries.

This is depicted as a public health measure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and was defended on those grounds by a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson last week.

But giving such authority to individual agents has led to decisions at the border that seem capricious and racist. The spokesperson insisted that agents had clear standards to decide when to admit individuals on “humanitarian” grounds. Yet reporting by Kate Morrissey of The San Diego Union-tribune paints a chaotic, troubling picture.

Morrissey’s analysis of Customs and Border Protection data found that people from countries with mostly White residents were much less likely to be expelled under Title 42 than people from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. This was true under both Trump and Biden.

One story told of how three Ukrainians walked up to the San Ysidro Port of Entry to request asylum and were let in the United States within about an hour or so. But Russians who shared the same fear of persecution under Russian dictator Vladimir Putin as the Ukrainians whose nation Putin invaded last month were denied entry. So were Mexican families and a Nigerian man who said he had been shot while in Mexico.

Thankfully, major changes are in the works. Citing U.S. officials and draft Department of Homeland Security documents, Reuters and Buzzfeed News have recently reported that the Biden administration is giving serious consideration to ending Title 42 pending a lengthy internal review.

And on Thursday, the administration released a comprehensive plan to speed up the processing of 670,000-plus backlogged asylum claims by adding many new asylum officers to evaluate the claims.

The administration hopes to be able to process each case in six months instead of the present five years. Devoting far more resources to this problem has always been the obvious solution.

But will Title 42 be replaced with a policy that also has arbitrary standards? If so, the problems will remain as profound at the start of the asylumseeking process as in the middle and the end.

On immigration, concerns about cruelty with the last president have given way to concerns about competence and cohesiveness with the new one. Unless he can fix the initial asylum evaluation process so it is coherent and fair for all, Joe Biden invites and deserves criticism. In year two of his presidency, not being Donald Trump is not good enough.