President Joe Biden’s radical appointee to the Justice Department’s civil rights division is smashing another legal hole in the nation’s immigration law with a June 16 decision offering citizenship to migrants who claim they are fleeing spousal abuse or local crime.
The decision was announced by the radical chief of the civil regulation division, Vanita Gupta, and it revives discarded asylum-expanding rulings by President Barack Obama’s appointees to the department-run immigration courts.
President Donald Trump’s deputies had discarded the Obama-era expansions, known as Matter of A.B. and Matter of L.E.A.
“Today’s decision will lead to tens of thousands of meritless asylum claims—if not hundreds of thousands—in the months and years ahead,” said a statement from Gene Hamilton, the vice president at the America First Legal nonprofit law firm and a former top official in President Donald Trump’s justice department.
Hamilton’s statement said:
Generalized crime in other countries has never been a legitimate basis for asylum under the laws passed by Congress—despite the best efforts of advocates and radicals during the Obama Administration to provide otherwise … This, of course, is part of a bigger plan under the Biden Administration that involves the Department of Homeland Security granting asylum en masse along the border to anyone who comes from a country with higher general crime rates than the United States. The Biden Administration will deport roughly zero percent of those who do not qualify for asylum, these new meritless cases will lead to delayed relief for legitimate asylees, and these radical decisions will ensure open borders for as long as they remain in effect. The American people deserve better.
The decision supports the establishment’s policy of extracting many migrant workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries, via a series of legal loopholes in the nation’s very complex immigration laws.
For example, when illegal migrants are caught near the border, DHS chief Alejandro Mayorkas uses his legal authority to send them back to the five-yard line in Mexico instead of flying them 2,000 miles back to Central America.
Mayorkas is helping economic migrants get jobs by letting them file for political asylum in the United States. He is helping teenage economic migrants walk into jobs via a side door created in 2008 law for victimized children. He is helping economic migrants stay in the United States by letting them use the same 2008 law — and new rules for refugees — to pull their left-behind children and spouses up into the United States.
Mayorkas is also using his parole power to invite lawfully deported migrants to rejoin their left-behind migrant children who are applying for asylum. He is using the U Visa program to provide work permits and Social Security Numbers to migrants who say they were victimized by a crime in the United States.
The June 16 decision does not have an immediate impact on the immigration courts, but it allows DHS to finalize a planned regulatory change to the nation’s asylum law.
To win asylum and the huge prize of U.S. citizenship, migrants must show they are facing persecution — or have a “well-founded fear” of persecution — because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or their membership in a “particular social group.”
These categories were intended for a small number of foreigners so that economic migrants would not flood U.S. workplaces and so deny Americans a decent living in their own national labor market.
But the pro-migration bipartisan establishment has tried to widen each of the categories. For example, it now allows economic migrants to get jobs while they wait several years for judges to reject their claims for asylum. Also, under new deportation rules set by Mayorkas, the asylum excuse economic migrants will not be sent home if their claims are denied.
Now that the DoJ has revived the Obama-era asylum rulings, Mayorkas is expected to soon widen the definition of “particular social group.” For example, he is expected to include many more categories of people, including the categories of people who claim their governments do not protect them from spousal abuse or local criminals.
Mayorkas’s wider asylum rules likely may be challenged in the courts. But challenges may be blocked if judges declare that Americans or state officials do not have “standing” to file a lawsuit. To get standing, lawsuits must show that particular people were improperly and clearly harmed by regulatory action.
Many pro-migration groups are lobbying Mayorkas to protect their favored groups, such as “Afro-descendants” in Central and South America.
The Washington Post’s Paulina Villegas contributed to the lobbying with a June 13 article that provided an emotional argument for giving asylum and citizenship to people who claim spousal abuse. She did not include any mention of migration’s impact on Americans’ opportunities, wages, rents, productivity, and political status:
María de Jesús packed her bags and fled Guatemala City with her 11-year-old son on a cold night weeks later. She paid a smuggler and trekked north to the U.S.-Mexico border, where she hoped the Biden administration, promising a more humanitarian approach toward immigrants, would welcome a domestic violence survivor like herself into the country.
“The only solution was to be far away where I didn’t feel scared every day,” said María de Jesús, 39, who, out of security concerns, spoke on the condition that her last name not be used.
The article included no comments from pro-American groups but did include quotes from migrants seeking asylum and from pro-migration lobbies, including the International Rescue Committee, plus the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California at San Francisco.
Gupta’s decision, approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland, was praised by pro-migration groups.
“The Biden administration has taken another critical step towards restoring access to asylum and welcoming refugees with dignity, said a statement from the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, which has received aid from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Under Trump, the statement said, “asylum approval rates plummeted for people escaping persecution perpetrated by members of their families and communities, with a disproportionate impact on women, children, and LGBTQ+ people. Many were ordered deported to their home countries to face the very violence they had fled.”
“Today’s announcement will help undo some of the damage caused by the Trump administration’s attacks on asylum,” said a statement from the ACLU.
Each year, four million young Americans enter the workforce and are forced by their government to compete against a growing population of illegal migrants, against one million new legal immigrants and the resident workforce of roughly two million temporary guest workers.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into good jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
The voter opposition to elite-backed economic migration coexists with support for legal immigrants and some sympathy for illegal migrants. But only a minority of Americans — mostly leftists — embrace the many skewed polls and articles pushing the 1950’s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.
The deep public opposition to labor migration is built on the widespread recognition that legal and illegal migration moves money away from most Americans’ pocketbooks and families.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to investors, from technology to stoop labor, from red states to blue states, and from the central states to the coastal states such as New York.