Asylum seekers await news of CBP One appointments at the El Chaparral port of passage in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, on Tuesday.
Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images
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Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images
Seeking asylum in the United States via the southern border has been suspended under an executive order signed by President Trump this week.
Critics say the move to indefinitely suspend asylum is unprecedented and will likely be challenged in court.
Asylum has been part of US law since 1980, allowing those who fear for their safety to seek refuge in the United States provided they can prove it. a credible fear of persecution in their country of origin.
In a fact sheet released Wednesday, the White House said that “in exercising his authority, President Trump further restricted access to provisions of the immigration laws that would allow any illegal alien involved in an invasion to cross the southern border of the United States. The United States must remain in the United States, like asylum.
Presidents of both parties have tried in the past to make it more difficult to apply for asylum, but no other president has taken Trump’s steps to completely suspend that application at the southern border.
Trump’s order is part of a series of sweeping actions he has signed since his inauguration this week to restrict legal and illegal immigration to the United States. Hours after taking office, Trump abruptly shut down a mobile app used by asylum seekers waiting in Mexico to make appointments. with American immigration officials.
The closure effectively meant that asylum seekers at the border had no way of getting an appointment.
Trump’s border restrictions will be eased once he determines that “the invasion at the southern border has ceased,” he said in a proclamation Monday — although it’s unclear how that decision will be taken.
Trump won re-election largely on his promises to target illegal immigration, border security and deport millions of migrants without legal status in the country, including migrants who have not committed crimes.
A Venezuelan immigrant waiting in Nogales, Mexico, tries in vain to access the CBP One app a day after President Trump’s second inauguration.
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This is not the first time Trump has tried to use his authority end asylum.
During his first administration, Trump barred migrants from filing their asylum claims between ports of entry and barred those who had traveled through another from seeking asylum.
This time, his executive orders rely on a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that allows the entry of migrants to be suspended after declaring an invasion at the U.S. southern border.
ACLU calls suspension ‘unprecedented’
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrant Rights Project, told NPR that Trump’s action “means that no one will be allowed to seek asylum in the United States anymore.”
“This is unprecedented; this is a total ban on all asylum,” Gelernt said. “This goes way beyond anything even President Trump has attempted in the past.”
He declined to say whether the ACLU would sue Trump.
Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, also called Trump’s action on asylum “blatantly illegal and unconstitutional,” adding that Trump cannot end the asylum with a simple stroke of a pen.
“The president cannot single-handedly overturn laws passed by Congress, nor can he unilaterally change international treaties to which the United States is a party,” Mukherjee said.
She also questioned Trump’s argument that there is an invasion at the southern border, an argument the White House is using to justify suspending all asylum seekers.
Under the Biden administration, unauthorized crossings reached an all-time high in December 2023. The Border Patrol made nearly 250,000 arrests in December of that year alone.
However, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows that unauthorized crossings have declined sharply compared to COVID-era numbers. The change can be attributed in part to Biden’s asylum restrictions at the border, which prompted people to drop off their petitions at a port of entry.
Mukherjee said Trump’s actions send the message that the United States “is no longer a beacon of freedom, of hope, of protection for refugees and asylum seekers.”
