On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “At This Hour,” John Sandweg, who served as acting Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under President Barack Obama, stated that migrants do take advantage of the asylum system in the United States and the fact that people can’t be removed from the U.S. until a judge rules on their asylum claim, which usually takes a while.
Sandweg said, “Well, the underlying source of all of these problems is we’ve never adequately funded our asylum system to handle the claims. But under longstanding U.S. law, if you enter the United States, even illegally, and get two feet on American soil and you make a credible claim to asylum, you cannot be deported or removed unless and until an immigration judge determines your claim is not credible or doesn’t meet the standard for asylum. So, the problem had been, very quickly, that word got out that it — we — a surge of claims overwhelms the system. So, the Trump administration was struggling with how to deal with this, because under these longstanding laws, they couldn’t deport these people until the court system determined they didn’t have a claim and the court system was overwhelmed. So, when the pandemic hit, Trump was able to use what’s called Title 42, which is a public health authority, to say, okay, because of a public health crisis, the border is now closed and even though you’ve now made a credible asylum claim, we’re still going to push you into Mexico until such time as the public health crisis is abated. So, it is a band-aid, it’s a tool that both the Biden administration continued because it allows them to take these asylum-seekers who would otherwise be present in the United States until this overwhelmed immigration court system could deal with their case and it allows them to forcibly send them back to Mexico to wait until the pandemic ended.”
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