Immigration Article of the Day: In Continuation of a ‘Unified Immigration Agenda’: The End of Asylum at the Southwest Border by Sophie Capicchiano Young

In Continuation of a ‘Unified Immigration Agenda’: The End of Asylum at the Southwest Border by Sophie Capicchiano Young

Abstract

Through a complementary framework of laws, policies, and practices, the Biden administration has built upon the immigration agenda of previous US administration, restricting the right to seek asylum for those arriving at the Southwest border almost entirely.  Principally, it has expanded certain laws and policies implemented by the Trump administration - some of which it has vigorously defended in court – and implemented new laws and policies, specifically a Final Rule entitled ‘Circumvention of Lawful Pathways,’ which limits asylum but for the most exceptional circumstances.  As this article demonstrates, those exceptional circumstances have been interpreted and applied by Customs and Border Patrol officers in terms even narrower than the Final Rule permits.  

The restriction of asylum has been realised through two specific modifications of US immigration law and by extension, fundamental precepts of international refugee law: the conflation of asylum seekers and migrants as classes of individual subject to undifferentiated legal processes, and through the qualification of asylum based on mode of arrival, specifically, arrival by land at the Southwest border having already passed through another Central American state – a condition that applies to all land arrivals by non-Mexican nationals.  

Through an analysis of quantitative data, and a series of qualitative interviews with legal service providers, shelter providers, independent researchers at US PoEs including at San Ysidro, Brownsville, Hidalgo, Laredo, and El Paso, and a former senior US Border Patrol agent, this article demonstrates that the implementation of the Biden administration’s immigration agenda and the practice of Customs and Border Protection officers forms part of a ‘unified immigration agenda’ of multiple sequential US administrations, the purpose of which is to restrict access to asylum, create conditions unconducive to spontaneous arrival at the Southwest border, and impose extreme hardships on those that enter the US.  The Biden administration has continued to pursue the unified immigration agenda by implementing Circumvention of Lawful Pathways, creating extreme dangers for asylum seekers arriving at the Southwest border, and essentially ending the provision of asylum, even for those that are clearly in need of protection.

KJ