The right to apply for asylum has long been recognized as a cornerstone of international and U.S. law. When he was running for president, Biden assailed Trump for his attempts to deny this right to immigrants. But since he became president, Biden has out-Trumped Trump. He initiated a policy of “expedited removal,” which enables the U.S. to deport immigrants almost as soon as they apply for asylum. He revived and refurbished Trump’s “travel ban” against asylum applicants who had traveled through Mexico before reaching the U.S.
Then, on May 11, two new, major restrictions in Biden’s asylum policy were activated. One slashes in half the time asylum seekers have to find a lawyer. Now they have only 24 hours after they are placed in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facility. Think of what this means to people who are in a country foreign to them, who probably don’t know the language, who have no familiarity with lawyers available to them, who probably have difficulty just getting to a phone. But the clock will be running on them as soon as they set foot in a DHS building.
Two, in the spirit of “first the verdict, then the trial,” another new Biden restriction creates for most asylum seekers a “presumption that these immigrants are ineligible for asylum.…” This means that immigrants must file for asylum with people who, as a matter of government policy, presume that they don’t deserve it.
These measures shred and make a mockery of the right to asylum while keeping it “on the books.” A Biden administration official claimed that the Biden administration has “led the largest expansion of lawful pathways for migrants to come to the U.S. directly in decades.” This is pure hypocritical bullshit.
Trump launched openly fascist and Amerikkkan chauvinist attacks on immigrants. He repudiated the right to asylum altogether. Unlike Trump, Biden has not launched a frontal assault to eliminate asylum. He postures himself as “humane” and “concerned.” But he has accomplished something even more sinister than Trump. His administration has created severe and harsh restrictions on asylum that will have a devastating impact on the overwhelming majority of those who apply for it—while maintaining the sadistic facade of “equality and justice.” And for both, the end result is forcefully preventing people from even reaching the U.S., and quickly driving out many of those who do.
This is not because Biden is somehow “worse than Trump.” Nor is it due to the fact that, almost certainly, he knowingly lied about what he would do. It is because Biden serves a system—the capitalist-imperialist system—which at this point has no answers to the massive surge of immigration now going on. This surge, as we have shown on this site (see here and the articles in the American Crime series on El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras), has been caused by the crimes of that system itself: the domination, distortion and plundering of the economies of these nations by this imperialist system; the devastation of the environments of the Global South caused by capitalism; and the destruction of the civil societies of these lands through imperialist invasions, coups and manipulation.