The Biden administration Thursday issued a new asylum processing regulation in efforts to accelerate the asylum and deportation process at the US-Mexico border.
This regulation is in response to the record influx of migrants seeking entrance to the US. The final asylum rule, still unpublished, will go into effect in late May or early June of this year. The final rule has not been substantially altered from its initial proposal in August 2021.
The policy will begin to allow border officers to either accept or reject migrants’ claims for protection once they cross over the border. This will essentially accelerate the process by allowing migrants to skip the US immigration courts, where their cases are consistently backlogged for years at a time. The immigration courts, at the end of February, had more than 670,000 pending cases.
Instead, migrants will have their entrance claims heard by asylum officers. The majority of migrants come from Mexico and Central America, but in recent years migrants have been traced back to further reaches of the world. This most notably includes migrants fleeing from Ukraine in the wake of the Russian invasion.
The Department of Homeland Security, which is issuing the new rule jointly with the Department of Justice, has been outspoken against the current handling of the asylum system for years. The departments have hope that the process will provide an “expedited removal” in order to resolve cases quicker and more effectively. An official within the US Citizenship and Immigration Services department explained that the process will be gradually put together and will initially start with a small number of migrants. Currently, border officials have been detaining more than 13,000 undocumented immigrants per day.
The idea is that by adding less cases to the immigration court docket, the backlog of asylum cases, which currently account for 40 percent of all backlogged cases, will be drastically reduced. While the new rule aims to speed up this process and limit the hurdles placed on migrants, immigration advocates have their concerns as well.
In addition to this new policy, the Biden administration has hopes to also repeal the controversial Title 42 order, initiated by former President Donald Trump. The order allowed border authorities to expel migrants crossing the border to Mexico and other countries in an effort to combat the spread of COVID-19.
