Biden Tweaks Asylum Rules to Minimize Media Coverage of Criminal Migrants

President Joe Biden’s deputies are tweaking the asylum rules to trim their release of additional criminal migrants into the United States before the 2024 election.

The proposed rule change is getting good headlines for the administration — and is being used by Biden’s campaign team to aid his very low polls. Axios presented the White House’s narrative: “It is one of several actions being weighed by President Biden to clamp down on illegal border crossings ahead of the election, as Biden and Democrats try to go on offense on one of their most vulnerable issues.”

But  the pro-migration Associated Press admitted, “The [four sources] also said the proposal affects a relatively small universe of migrants and those who would not be qualified to receive asylum protections anyway.”

“That was something that the Trump administration proposed, but [in 2021] the Biden administration was like, ‘Yeah, no, we’re not doing that,'” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News.

“They’re probably doing this [rule change] because they know they released somebody who was [criminally] bad,” Arthur said, adding, “This is not an administration that is going to undo a rule followed by the [George W.] Bush administration, the Obama administration …  unless there’s a damn good reason for it.”

“All of this suggests that there’s more that’s going on than the administration is telling us,” he said.

On May 8, the illegal alien accused of murdering 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley this year was indicted on ten counts, including murder, kidnapping, and assault with intent to rape.

Breitbart News reported on May 8:

Ibarra was first encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border near El Paso, Texas, on September 8, 2022. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials cited “detention capacity” as the reason Ibarra was awarded parole and released into the U.S. interior despite there having been available detention space.

On July 19, 2023, Ibarra reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials in New York City for a biometric appointment where he was fingerprinted. The results of those fingerprints showed that Ibarra had a prior criminal history [outside the United States], his case file states.

The Riley murder created a huge political problem for Biden and his pro-migration border chief — Alejandro Mayorkas — because it prompted much TV news coverage of Biden’s migrant crime wave.

For example, NPR radio reported May 9:

“Unfortunately, crime is up,” Carlos Chaparro says in Spanish. He runs a vocational school on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York. It’s a traditionally Latin American neighborhood that has become a magnet for many of the approximately 190,000 migrants who’ve come through New York in the last two years.

“My clients say that when they leave [the school] at night, they’re being attacked and mugged, increasingly in the last year,” he says.

NPR talked to more than 20 people along this commercial strip, and they all said their impression was that crime has gone up in the last year. It’s a trend that is reflected in the statistics. According to the New York City Police Department’s CompStat system, crime in this precinct is up more than 15% in the first four months of this year compared with the same period last year, while it’s down in the city as a whole. Robbery is up more than 40% in the first four months of this year compared with the same period last year.

Since 2021, Biden’s deputies have been using asylum laws from the Cold War era to let at least 1.1 million economic migrants walk into American jobs and homes. They adopted the easy-migration policies because Biden’s progressive deputies think borders are bad for “equity” and because Biden’s business allies want more consumers, renters, and workers.

The current two-step asylum procedure allows migrants to ask a judge for asylum after they pass a quick “credible fear” test at the border, Arthur said. The two-step process is intended to reduce the number of asylum court cases because federal law says asylum seekers must be detained until their asylum cases are decided.

However, the administration is refusing to detain even unidentified migrants, so migrants have a huge incentive to pass the test by hiding their names and criminal histories. Once released, they can live and work in the United States for many years until the backlogged asylum judges and appeals court judges decide that enforcement officers can find and deport them.

Biden’s catch-and-release strategy means that many foreign criminals are encouraged to pass the credible fear test by hiding their names and criminal histories.

Arthur explained the process. “Right now in the credible fear screening process, they don’t determine whether you’re [legally] barred from receiving asylum based on criminality or national security. So you could be Osama bin Laden, show up at the border and say, ‘You can’t send me back because the Saudi Arabians are going to torture me’ — which would probably be true if he were still alive. So even if the asylum officer [at the border] knows that person is Osama bin Laden and knows all the bad things that they’ve done and knows that they’re barred [from getting asylum] based on national security risk [or a criminal record], the asylum officer can’t take it into consideration in determining whether the person is credible.

“So what this proposes to do is to give the [border asylum officers] the ability to make that [criminal and national security threat] determination at the outset,” he continued, “and simply remove them [before they can get to a judge] because they’re not going to be eligible for asylum. This is a pretty basic change. This is quite frankly common sense.”

Administration officials say they have narrowed the “credible fear” pass rate from above 70 percent to just below 60 percent since late 2023. Once the migrant reaches a judge, the final outcome is a matter of luck because judges’ approval rates range from 0 percent to 99 percent.

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and increasing real estate prices.

The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded, low-status Americans.

The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens and economies in Canada and the United Kingdom.

The colonialism-like policy has damaged small nations and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.