Progressives Assault Donald Trump’s ‘Legal Wall’ Rule Against Migrants

Can Trump use 'emergency powers' to build border wall?
AFP
Neil Munro

Pro-migration progressives are damning a new regulation that denies migrants the right to even ask for asylum if they have traveled through Mexico without first asking Mexico’s government for asylum.

“This is an effort to end all asylum at the southern border,” said Todd Schulte, director of the Silicon Valley lobbying group, FWD.us, which supports the mass inflow of migrants into the U.S. labor and consumer markets. “This is an effort–in clear violation of US law, international law, and basic truthfulness to claim these countries are safe–by the United States of America to deny anyone asylum.”

“It is totally illegal,” tweeted Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress. Migrants “would have to meet a higher threshold—reasonable fear of persecution—to avoid deportation and be sent to Mexico FOR MONTHS before getting back to Immigration Court where they’d have to meet a HIGHER burden of proof to receive a LESSER form of protection.”

“READ the Trump administration’s latest blatantly illegal action — so blatant it goes against a plain reading of the statute and subverts the will of Congress — to try and shut down the asylum system,” said a tweet from Philip Wolgin, director of immigration policy for CAP Action, an activist spin-off of the Center for American Progress.

The proposed legal wall would effectively end the catch and release of most migrants into the U.S. blue-collar labor market and crash the cartels’ labor-trafficking industry, which reportedly earns more than $2 billion a year. The cartels’ profit comes from the wages of migrants who ask for asylum, get released from overcrowded border shelters, and then take U.S. jobs.

The huge inflow of Central American adults, youths, and children has exceeded 100,000 for four months, thereby helping to weaken pressures on CEOs to approve wage increases. The wage freeze is good for urban progressives who gain from cheaper services in restaurants — but also pay higher rents amid the migrant-crowded cities.

The inflow is also adding hundreds of thousands of foreign children to the crowded and chaotically diverse public schools needed by American kids and is also driving up rents for American families, especially in communities of American Latinos.

The migrants tell reporters they are trying to enter the United States to get jobs, health care, and better lives. But none of those reasons are valid legal grounds for getting asylum.

In response, Democrats insist the migrants are trying to save their lives from criminal violence. But criminal violence is also not a legally valid reason for an asylum request.

If the courts allow the regulation, it would also reduce the burdens on the border agencies, helping them use his slowly extending steel border wall to help block drugs coming into rural and blue-collar communities.

White-collar pro-migration progressive immediately denounced President Trump’s latest move in the complex, broad and perpetual high-stakes move-countermove war for America. Wolgin continued:

Congress has been clear that the only way that an administration can bar asylum seekers when they pass through another country (e.g. Mexico,) is with a SIGNED Safe Third Country agreement. Spoiler alert: They don’t have one here. But hey, why should Trump follow the law?

And for all Trump’s claims to ‘want legal immigration’ his is willing to break whatever laws it takes to stop people from coming legally. Don’t let his nativist agenda fool you. This is about restricting legal immigrants, and no amount of lawlessness is too much for Trump.

Pro-migration groups are expected to quickly ask pro-migration judges to block the case, likely leaving the final decision to the U.S Supreme Court in 2020 or 2021.

A statement from Attorney General William P. Barr said:

This Rule is a lawful exercise of authority provided by Congress to restrict eligibility for asylum. The United States is a generous country but is being completely overwhelmed by the burdens associated with apprehending and processing hundreds of thousands of aliens along the southern border. This Rule will decrease forum shopping by economic migrants and those who seek to exploit our asylum system to obtain entry to the United States—while ensuring that no one is removed from the United States who is more likely than not to be tortured or persecuted on account of a protected ground.

The new regulation states:

Pursuant to statutory authority, the Departments are amending their respective regulations to provide that, with limited exceptions, an alien who enters or attempts to enter the United States across the southern border after failing to apply for protection in a third country outside the alien’s country of citizenship, nationality, or last lawful habitual residence through which the alien transited en route to the United States is ineligible for asylum. This basis for asylum ineligibility applies only prospectively to aliens who enter or arrive in the United States on or after the effective date of this rule. In addition to establishing a new mandatory bar for asylum eligibility for aliens who enter or attempt to enter the United States across the southern border after failing to apply for protection from persecution or torture in at least one third country through which they transited en route to the United States, this rule would also require asylum officers and immigration judges to apply this new bar on asylum eligibility when administering the credible-fear screening process.

The new announcement comes after Trump’s planned “safe third country” deal with Guatemala has hit major setbacks:

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