Asylum seekers will have their claims evaluated by asylum officers instead of overburdened immigration judges under a new policy aimed at greatly shortening the process.
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A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer guiding asylum-seeking migrants across a bridge from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, into the United States in 2019. The asylum process now takes about five years.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has finalized a plan to overhaul the system for immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, aiming to take a burden off the backlogged immigration courts in what some experts see as the most sweeping change to the process in a quarter-century.
Under the new policy, which administration officials said would be published in the coming days, some migrants seeking asylum will have their claims heard and evaluated by asylum officers instead of immigration judges.
The goal, administration officials said, is for the entire process to take six months, compared with a current average of about five years.
Mr. Biden pledged to “restore humanity” to the asylum system after four years of restrictive measures put in place by President Donald J. Trump. But the need to fix the overburdened asylum system, where more than 670,000 cases were pending at the end of February, long predates the last administration.
The new rule comes at a critical time, as border officials try to manage a record number of migrants crossing the southwestern border. Thousands of undocumented migrants are being released into the country, many with plans to apply for asylum.
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“It very well could be one of the most significant reforms to the asylum system in a long time, going beyond undoing the Trump administration’s attempts to limit access to asylum, and actually institute meaningful structural reforms,” said Austin C. Kocher, a geographer at Syracuse University who analyzes immigration enforcement data.
The administration did not provide a copy of the rule, but officials from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Office and Executive Office for Immigration Review, where asylum cases are handled, spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity on Wednesday about its final language. The officials said the final rule did not change substantially from the proposed version and the process would be rolled out slowly. They did not answer questions about where it would begin and how many migrants would be involved.
For the plan to be fully operational, the government needs to hire hundreds of new asylum officers.
“Through this rule, we are building a more functional and sensible asylum system to ensure that individuals who are eligible will receive protection more swiftly, while those who are not eligible will be rapidly removed,” Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, said in a statement.
Adding fewer cases to the immigration court system will help by contributing less to the backlog. Asylum cases make up about 40 percent of the 1.7 million case backlog.
The rule, proposed in August, drew more than 5,000 public comments. Many immigration advocates raised concerns about rushing migrants through the process and denying them due process. If the migrant does not pass the credible fear interview, an immigration judge will review the case. If the migrant does not win asylum after a more substantive interview with an officer, the case will automatically be sent to an immigration judge for review, which some conservatives fear will delay deporting migrants who do not qualify for asylum.
The new asylum application system will be used for migrants placed in what is called “expedited removal,” a processing lane established in a 1996 law for undocumented migrants that gives immigration officials the authority to deport people without a hearing or a lawyer in some circumstances.
In the expedited removal process, border officials ask migrants if they are afraid to return to their own countries. Migrants who say they have a fear of returning are scheduled for a “credible fear” interview by an asylum officer.
Until now, migrants who passed the “credible fear” interview joined the thousands of others waiting for years to appear before an immigration judge and officially apply for asylum. But under the new plan, migrants who pass the initial screening will then make their case to an asylum officer, a process considered much less confrontational than going before a judge and facing government prosecutors.
Still, some immigration advocates have raised concerns about managing asylum cases through the expedited removal process, which they say has long been flawed because it allows border officials — not immigration judges — to issue removal orders in situations where a migrant does not request a credible fear interview.
“While assessing asylum eligibility through initial asylum office interviews is both more humane and efficient, this reform should not be premised on the use of the fundamentally flawed and due-process-deficient expedited removal system,” said Eleanor Acer, the senior director for refugee protection at Human Rights First.
The new rule will go into effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register. During that time, the administration said it would accept new comments.
For now, potential asylum seekers face an additional hurdle: a pandemic-related public health order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that gives border officials the authority to expel migrants at the border, denying them the chance to ask for asylum. That will continue to be the policy for as long as the public health rule is in place, Mr. Mayorkas said recently.
Source: nytimes.com
