by Eric Lendrum
Despite Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric frequently attacking President Donald Trump for his strict immigration policies, the Biden Administration is set to implement asylum rules that echo Trump-era policies.
As reported by Politico, Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a proposal that would forbid illegal aliens from applying for asylum if they crossed the border illegally, or if they failed to apply for safe harbor in the first safe country in which they arrived. The rule is set to be implemented on May 11th after a 30-day period for public comment, and would remain in place for at least two years.
The date of May 11th coincides with the end of Title 42, a major public health rule that allowed President Trump to largely shut down immigration, legal and illegal, during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic. The policy gave the President broader authority to halt immigration due to the public health threat presented by hordes of third-world illegal aliens potentially spreading the coronavirus and other diseases upon entering the country. Biden has repeatedly vowed to end Title 42 despite its widespread popularity, as well as backlash from border states over the likely surge of illegals that will result from the policy’s end.
Nevertheless, the Biden Administration has already begun facing backlash from far-left amnesty advocates and open-borders activists, who compared the new proposal to the Trump-era policies that Biden once opposed.
Andrea Flores, a former Biden official who currently serves as chief counsel for Senator Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), baselessly claimed that the new policy “normalizes the White nationalist belief that asylum seekers from certain countries are less deserving of humanitarian protections.” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, a former Obama official who now represents the far-left Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, claims that the Biden Administration’s proposal “reaches into the dustbin of history to resurrect one of the most harmful and illegal anti-asylum policies of the Trump administration.”
And the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has already threatened a lawsuit against the Biden Administration if the rule is implemented, with spokesman Lee Gelernt stating that “we successfully sued to stop the Trump asylum bans, and will sue again if the Biden administration enacts these anti-asylum rules.”
In response, administration officials claimed on a conference call with reporters that the policy would not represent a “categorical ban” on all asylum-seekers, but would instead expand “existing lawful pathways” to illegals through parole programs.
Later, another administration official claimed that the new rule “was not our first preference or even our second.”
“From day one,” the official continued, “President Biden has urged Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures to ensure orderly, safe and humane processing of migrants at our border.”
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
