The Biden administration has closed hundreds of thousands of asylum cases filed by migrants, allowing the asylum program to operate as a “mass amnesty” for migrants to allow them to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, the New York Post reported Monday.
According to the Post, asylum cases for over 350,000 migrants who don’t have a criminal record or are otherwise not deemed a threat to the country have been closed by the Biden administration since 2022.
Terminating an asylum case means bypassing the typical adjudication of the merits of a migrant’s asylum claim before a Department of Justice immigration court.
When an asylum claim is adjudicated — a process that can take more than five years due to a backlog of 3.5 million cases — the migrant is either granted asylum, or is rejected, and is then subject to another sometimes yearslong process of removal proceedings.
“If the migrants, who [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] no longer controls or monitors, commit crimes after the dismissal, ICE will have to start all over and issue a new Notice to Appear in court and start the clock all over again,” an ICE official told The Post on Monday.
Increasingly, however, the Biden administration is simply releasing migrants into the country and terminating their asylum cases without a decision on the merits of their asylum claim, allowing them to stay in the U.S. indefinitely without being required to check in with authorities and without fear of deportation.
“This is just a massive amnesty under the guise of prosecutorial discretion,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works for the Center for Immigration Studies told the Post.
“You’re basically allowing people who don’t have a right to be in the United States to be here indefinitely,” he added.
[RELATED: Homeland Secretary: Illegal Aliens Trying to “game” Asylum Rules…]
In 2020, under the Trump administration, fewer than 20,000 migrants were granted asylum, compared to over 50,000 migrants granted asylum under President Biden in 2023, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
The data is even more striking when it comes to terminated asylum cases — in 2020, the Trump administration closed or terminated less than 5,000 asylum cases, compared to nearly 150,000 asylum cases terminated under Biden in 2023.
Once a migrant’s asylum case is terminated, they can reapply for asylum or seek other resident status in the U.S. through a family- or employment-based visa program, Temporary Protected Status, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, aka “DACA,” immigration lawyer Sergio C. Garcia told The Post.
<span class="dsq-postid" data-dsqidentifier="28327 https://www.themainewire.com/?p=28327">1 Comment
Are the migrants the Democrat’s new version of a modern day slave trade, cheap labor, that can be fed scraps with the promise of a better life? Or a mercenary foreign legion, we will take anyone willing to service us with the promise of citizenship?
There must be a master plan, I question the elite