The Biden administration's decision to heavily restrict the arrival of asylum-seekers to the United States once a certain threshold is met has been met with mixed reactions across the political spectrum.
Immigration advocates are among those who have been highly critical of the measure, with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) emphasizing that the figures sought have been hardly met throughout the century and enforcement will violate the law.
The organization's Adam Isacson highlighted that the threshold necessary for the border to be "reopened," fewer than 1,500 encounters a day for two weeks, has only been seen in 42% of the century's months. "58% of all months this century (172 of 296) have seen daily averages above 1,500," he said, using Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) figures as reference.
The shutdown is set to be reimposed when daily averages exceed 2,500 per day, with figures already being higher than that. "In fact, the U.S.-Mexico border has crossed that threshold in 110 of the past 296 months: 37% of this century," the report added.
Isacson went on to describe the "difficult-to-meet thresholds and very narrow exceptions" as a measure similar to the "Trump administration's 2018 attempt to ban asylum access between ports of entry with no numerical limits."
He added that courts ended up striking down the provision down because "the law states clearly that people on U.S. soil may request asylum without regard to how they arrived."
The current measure, he added, is likely to be deemed unlawful as the Refugee Act of 1980 states that non-citizens have the right to request asylum if they fear for their life or freedom "on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion."
Another immigration advocate who criticized the measure is Senator Alex Padilla, who said that "by reviving Trump's asylum ban, President Biden has undermined American values and abandoned our nation's obligations to provide people fleeing persecution, violence and authoritarianism with an opportunity to seek refuge in the U.S."
Padilla, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, also said that the "asylum ban will fail to address the challenges at our border just as it did under the Trump administration."
In another passage of the report, Isacson forebode that the measure won't "deter" migrants seeking to reach the U.S. even if figures fall in the short term as a result of a "wait and see effect." This period, he said, "fades quickly as migrants adapt to the new policy, and numbers recover."
"In the case of Title 42, migration numbers not only recovered, they spiked to historic levels: expulsions enabled repeat attempts to cross with no consequences, while migrants from distant countries realized that their chances of expulsion were minimal," he recalled. And even if some are in fact deterred by harsher penalties, "we have seen time and time again that people fleeing for their lives will continue to seek protection in the U.S. regardless of the risks," he concluded.
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