The Trump administration has created a new program to send illegal aliens who claim “asylum” back home within 10 days or less, yet another initiative to secure the border that has met with the usual objections from the usual leftists.
The new Prompt Asylum Claim review, the Washington Post reported yesterday, “streamlines the asylum process so that migrants who are seeking safe refuge in the United States will receive a decision in 10 days or less, rather than the months or years it currently takes, according to Customs and Border Protection officials. The reviews are largely to determine if Central American migrants can be sent back to their homelands.”
Of course, most migrants aren’t seeking “safe refuge,” as the “migrants” themselves have admitted to reporters and researchers, the latter having found that few if any “migrants” are running from “violence” but instead coming for jobs and welfare.
The program does what it should do. It deters migrants from coming, and sends the ones who do come back home before they disappear and burrow into the welfare and public-school systems.
The Program
According to the Post, the program is only operating in El Paso.
After Border Patrol agents catch the illegals, they land in a newly opened facility “that remains largely empty because the number of migrants taken into custody has plunged in recent months,” the Post reported.
“They are given one day after arriving to call family or a lawyer, and then they have an interview with an asylum officer to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution if returned to their home country, according to a CBP official who described the program on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it publicly,” the newspaper reported.
Details about the program beyond that were thin, but the Post did report that the administration is speeding asylum claims. “New Trump administration policies make it difficult if not impossible for non-Mexican migrants to pass a credible-fear interview if they did not seek asylum in the first country they passed through after leaving their homeland,” the Post noted.
An asylum officer interviews the illegals. If they can’t meet the “credible-fear” standard, they’re entitled to a videoconference with an immigration judge, and “are then processed for deportation or moved into the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, depending on the interview finding and the judge’s ruling, according to immigration officials.”
Immigration judges in New Mexico, the Post reported, video conference asylum cases with illegals held in El Paso’s pilot program.
Complaints
The anti-American open borders lobby and its legal representatives are, of course, unhappy.
“Immigration lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union said the administration’s pilot denies asylum seekers due process and highlights the limited role lawyers can play; lawyers are not allowed to meet with their clients in Border Patrol stations and are limited to brief conversations by phone,” the Post reported.
“This is yet another example of Border Patrol carrying out a pilot project in secret, circumventing Congress and public scrutiny,” said Astrid Dominguez, director of the ACLU’s Border Rights Center. “Border Patrol is fast-tracking deportations while holding migrants at detention facilities … and barring oversight to ensure fair and humane treatment. Given Border Patrol’s track record of abuse, the last thing the agency should be allowed to do is shove migrants through a life-or-death decision-making process devoid of basic due-process protections.”
The Post also detailed the story of two illegal-alien sisters who hired an American attorney to represent them before they crossed the border. “They had notified the attorney of their plans before leaving their home country and signed forms authorizing [the attorney] to represent them,” the Post reported. The sisters showed up in the United States infants in tow, of course — and claimed they had “fled gang members.”
Great thing is, one’s already back home where she belongs:
The sisters failed their interviews to prove fear of persecution if returned home, and then one was ordered deported…. The woman was not represented by an attorney at her deportation proceeding despite requesting [the attorney’s] assistance…. She was returned to her home country Monday, less than two weeks after crossing the border.
The second sister decided to abandon her asylum claim because her child has become ill in Border Patrol custody, Rodriguez-Alvarez said. She is still being held in El Paso.
In other words, Prompt Asylum Claim review is working.
Photo: Zerbor / iStock / Getty Images Plus
