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President Biden finalized his new get-tough border policy Monday, making it easier to trigger the government’s expulsion powers for illegal immigrants along the U.S.-Mexico boundary.
When in effect, the policy limits asylum claims for those who try to sneak into the U.S., taking away a loophole that millions of migrants have used over the last three years to try to gain a foothold here.
Under Mr. Biden’s latest plans, the expulsion powers will remain in effect until illegal immigration drops below 1,500 encounters a day for 28 days, or far longer than the previous timeline. And the government will now count all illegal immigrants, including unaccompanied juveniles, in tallying whether border activity is bad enough to trigger the expulsion powers.
While sounding technical, the overall effect is to make the expulsion authority more lasting and easier to use.
The moves build on action Mr. Biden took in June, when he announced the shutdown powers, reviving tools used by his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Mr. Biden says the plan has been successful in taming what had been total chaos at the southern border.
In August, Customs and Border Protection tallied fewer than 108,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the southern boundary. Of those, roughly 58,000 were caught by the Border Patrol and the rest showed up at legal border crossings.
By contrast in December, the worst month on record, the Border Patrol caught nearly 250,000 migrants at the southern border, and CBP overall tallied more than 300,000 illegal entries, including at the official border crossings.
“That decisive action – the President’s Proclamation and the Departments’ joint interim final rule that implemented it – has been delivering results,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Monday.
Immigrant rights groups blasted the administration for the tightening, and the earlier iteration was already facing a legal battle.
“This rule is illegal, as we have explained in our pending lawsuit. Today’s announcements do nothing to address the ongoing violations of law,” said Omar Jadwat, at the American Civil Liberties Union.
The June policy was what’s known as an interim final rule. It put the policy in place while giving the public a chance to submit comments.
Monday’s action finalizes the policy with changes based on those comments.
In the official regulatory filing, the government admitted that migrant smugglers and the migrants themselves had figured out the loopholes in the U.S. system.
Chief among them is that lodging a bogus asylum claim could serve for years as a defense against deportation and, because the government didn’t have enough detention space, it virtually guaranteed they would be released and free to live in the U.S. while their cases were pending.
The administration blamed Congress for “lack of funding,” even though it was usually Mr. Biden proposing cuts to immigration enforcement spending, and Congress that delivered higher dollar amounts than the president sought.
That pattern was reversed under Mr. Trump. He would regularly request more enforcement resources than Congress was willing to deliver.
In his filing Monday, Mr. Mayorkas said the new policy is “working as intended” but needed the new “modest” changes.
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