The Government of the United States has announced this Monday a new regulation that authorizes the officials responsible for examining asylum requests to directly refer these cases to immigration judges, without the need to conduct a personal interview with the applicant beforehand.
The provision, which will come into effect immediately after its publication scheduled for this Tuesday, removes from the current regulation the mentions of the "right" of the asylum seeker to have an interview with an immigration official, as detailed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this way, the case will go directly to an immigration judge, officials who depend on the Department of Justice and not on an independent judiciary, thus facilitating an expulsion procedure.
The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency affiliated with the DHS, presents this modification as a way to alleviate the backlog in processing affirmative asylum applications and to strengthen national security. Its director, Joseph Edlow, argues that the regulatory change will serve to protect the integrity of the asylum system, which, in his view, has long been "subject to abuse in order to cause delays and obtain work permits, and not to address legitimate requests for protection."
"The asylum system of the United States exists to protect people who genuinely fear being persecuted, and this rule will help ensure that resources are directed towards the timely resolution of those requests, rather than to those who seek to use the system as a legal loophole," he stated in a press release.
USCIS has opened a 60-day period to receive comments and allegations about the new regulation before approving a final version. This review coincides with the restructuring of the immigration courts undertaken by the Department of Justice, which has incorporated staff specifically aimed at rejecting the majority of asylum claims and issuing expulsion orders more quickly.
According to the U.S. agency Bloomberg, the Department of Justice has hired hundreds of military lawyers and former attorneys from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to strengthen the court staff, while it has removed from their positions more than a hundred judges appointed during the term of the Democrat Joe Biden.
The Department of Homeland Security itself estimates in the text that around 444,000 files, out of an approximate total of 1.4 million asylum cases still pending resolution, could be affected by the implementation of this new regulation.