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To many people in the United States, life in this country is a privilege to be appreciated. To many foreign nationals seeking refugee status here, it’s their only hope to stay alive.
The difference in perceptions likely is a factor in our government’s increasingly hostile policies toward immigrants, placing expediency over humanity.
Citing a desire to reduce the number of pending asylum cases, the Biden administration recently cut the time petitioners have to secure legal counsel from 48 to 24 hours. It’s one of several steps the Biden and Trump administrations both have taken to make it easier to deport applicants who aren’t able to jump through a growing number of administrative hoops.
According to The Associated Press, the percentage of people who passed their initial asylum screenings during the second half of May, just after the shorter window was imposed, fell to 52%, compared to a 77% success rate during the second half of March, before the change.
Government officials note that immigrants still have the right to legal counsel, and many advocacy groups and pro-bono attorneys offer it, but there aren’t enough lawyers available to serve the many thousands of asylum seekers within one day of their requests. Most refugees don’t know their rights or the intricacies of the application process, and can’t do anything to help expedite their cases.
Such changes in the system might enable federal officials to boast that they’re making headway in cutting down the case backlog. But at what cost? In many cases, it means a possibly fatal return to their home country, simply because they couldn’t get the legal help they needed in the short amount of time allotted.
It seems logical that the administration would improve the system and reduce processing times by making assistance more available, not less.
Certainly, a change in policy won’t magically increase the number of attorneys able, and willing, to offer their services to immigrants, and reasonable deadlines must be set in order to ensure that the process is completed. However, immigration officials might be able to hire and train caseworkers to guide immigrants through their application and hearing process.
Also, we have long advocated for enabling officials to handle several similar cases together, including group hearings before immigration judges, so that those judges don’t take their entire day hearing individual cases that essentially are the same.
Adding roadblocks in order to make it easier to remove applicants who can’t move their sometimes complicated cases through the system in unreasonably short times is not the way to improve a system that sorely needs it. Officials need to invest more time crafting reasonable policies and procedures that can improve case flow, rather than take the lazy approach of culling away valid petitions just so they won’t have to deal with them.
Officials need to remember that many of these refugees risked their lives and endured severe hardship to get to our borders, because the dangers they faced at home made those sacrifices necessary. We must remember that they are people with lives and rights, not sheets of paper that can be tossed away.
