President Joe Biden is now considering taking executive action to raise the standards used to process and screen asylum-seekers at the southern border.
It comes after earlier this month the House voted to impeach Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas alleging a breach of public trust and ‘willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law.’
Meanwhile, a former senior administration official from Donald Trump’s White House said he is ‘obsessed’ with getting the military involved at the southern border, according to The Washington Post.
And if elected for another term in office, Trump has vowed he would prioritize tightening back up the southern border and said there would be ‘the largest domestic deportation’ in U.S. history with him at the helm.
President Joe Biden is preparing to issue an executive order that would increase standards during ‘credible fear interviews’ for asylum seekers crossing the southern border
The order, according to a Wednesday report, would adopt a ‘last in, first out’ policy that would more quickly deport migrants seeking asylum that don’t meet reasonable fear requirements. Pictured: Migrants cross under razor wire at the U.S.-Mexico border on February 6, 2024
The southern border crisis, economy and Biden’s advancing age are all major concerns for voters heading into the 2024 presidential election.
To address the first issue, Biden is considering bypassing Congress – after repeatedly blaming the legislative body for the border crisis – and taking unilateral action to make it harder for migrants to pass the initial asylum screening interview.
Biden’s order, officials familiar with deliberations tell NBC News, would also allow more quick deportations of recently arrived migrants who do not meet this increased criteria.
The new policies would instruct asylum officers to raise the standards for ‘credible fear interviews,’ which assess whether migrants have a reasonable concern to fear for their lives or safety in the countries from which they fled.
Additionally, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be told to adopt a ‘last in, first out’ policy, which would prioritize recently arrived migrants for deportation, the officials revealed.
When Biden entered office in January 2021, he immediately put an end to several of Trump’s policies at the southern border that were put in place to quell surging migration. This has led to massive increases in border crossings every day and exacerbated the illegal immigration and drug smuggling crisis.
Implementation of reversal of these policies is ultimately what led to Mayorkas’ impeachment, which was a way for House Republicans to punish the administration for handling of the southern border and migration.
In December, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered 301,983 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border – a new high in the number of single-month crossings.
Migrants cross the border to be received by Customs and Border Protection to be processed and have their asylum claims assessed
Former President Donald Trump says that if he wins another term in 2024, he would conduct ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’ by getting the military involved
Trump is looking to model a new immigration model off of a program under 1950s President Dwight D. Eisenhower known as ‘Operation Wetback,’ which is a derogatory slur used to refer to a Mexican living in the US without official authorization.
This program used military tactics to gather and remove migrants working in the U.S.
Trump pledges that if president again he would immediately launch a similar program that would lead to ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.’
‘Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history,’ Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Some claim that military round up and deportations would bottleneck detention spaces, but Trump and his team have said they would get around this issue by building mass deportation camps.