President Joe Biden announced new asylum restrictions on Tuesday aimed at slowing the flow of immigration at the overwhelmed southern border.
The executive order will suspend asylum claims at the border once a daily threshold for unauthorized crossings is reached. Former President Trump used the same legal provisions to ban immigration from majority-Muslim countries in 2017, and again in 2018 to suspend asylum rights for migrants who cross the border illegally.
Retired federal immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks told KNX News Chief Correspondent Charles Feldman that while she hasn’t seen any specific details on the plan, she doesn’t believe policies like this “have any significant effect” on the problems at the border.
“I've heard enough to realize that this is simply an attempt to close the border to illegal entrance,” she said. “What it will do, however, is when you close the border, you're closing the legal portion of the border, and so that’s just gonna create more backlogs for people who are trying to do things the right way.”
Marks said that historically, the way to stem illegal immigration is to allow more legal pathways to enter the country, which will require cooperation from Congress.
“Even with the dramatic need for [border] staffing, the appropriations people in Congress have not provided even the amount that has been requested by, say, the immigration court for this current fiscal year,” she noted.
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The American Civil Liberties Union, which successfully challenged similar immigration orders by Trump, has already announced an intent to sue to block Biden’s proposal.
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