Mayorkas Will Allow Woke DHS Officials to Grant Asylum at the Border

President Joe Biden’s deputies at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have drafted a rule to help woke agency officials give fast-track asylum and citizenship to economic migrants.

The rule would worsen “the current border disaster by all-but-ensuring that aliens who have entered illegally and claimed a fear of harm are released into the United States,” said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies.

By ensuring “catch and release” becomes the norm for economic migrants, it allows cartels and coyotes to profitably and easily deliver their indebted clients into U.S. jobs. So the rule would supercharge the nationwide wage theft suffered by blue collar Americans when employers can hire lower wage illegal migrants.

“Under this plan, pro-illegal bureaucrats just freely hand out asylum [approvals] at the border,” said an August 19 tweet from Stephen Miller, a former top aide to President Donald Trump. “Biden’s new proposed reg would effectively turn our border into a citizenship factory for illegals,” he added.

The draft regulation spotlights the administration’s determined, multiple, and overlapping efforts to expand the massive inflow of legal and illegal migrants into Americans’ workplaces and housing markets — despite the clear limits in U.S. law. In 2021, for example, Biden’s deputies are likely to accept almost one new migrant for every two infants born in the United States.

The difficult-to-understand regulation was posted on August 18 amid the Afghanistan furor and must yet survive likely court challenges.

“We are building an immigration system that is designed to ensure due process, respect human dignity, and promote equity,” said the statement from DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which repeated the administration’s poll-tested “fair, orderly, and humane” mantra:

This proposed rule joins a number of actions the Biden-Harris Administration is taking to build a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system, including by expanding pathways to apply for [U.S. residency from their] in home countries.

The real-world impact of Mayorkas’ proposed regulation is disguised by language that is only comprehensible to migration lawyers:

Under the proposed process, an individual who establishes a credible fear of removal will be referred to a USCIS asylum officer for a hearing on the protection claims.  The asylum officer will be authorized to adjudicate in the first instance requests for asylum, as well as eligibility for statutory withholding of removal or for withholding or deferral of removal under the Convention Against Torture.  In a denied case, the individual may request de novo administrative review by an immigration judge under a streamlined process, with further administrative appeal available through the Board of Immigration Appeals.

But advocates on both sides quickly unpacked the regulation.

The Mayorkas plan would open an entirely new gate in the nation’s border by allowing lower-level officials to interview migrants and then grant them asylum, even without a government lawyer to quiz the asylum applicant, Arthur wrote.

Many of the DHS officials in the asylum section joined the DHS because they are advocates for migrants and are eager to grant the huge, life-changing prize of citizenship to the grateful migrants who appear at their desks. The section of roughly 800 officials is “the most pro-illegal” group in DHS, Miller tweeted.

In 2016, an agency official told Breitbart News that officials in the section were crying after the election of President Donald Trump. Currently, Mayorkas wants to hire an extra 2,000 university graduates for the section.

The regulation also denies Americans the legal safeguards to prevent unjustified giveaways by pro-migrant officials, Arthur said. “The alien would have a right to an attorney at a proceeding that would place the alien on a path to citizenship, but the American people do not have a right to have an [government] attorney represent them to attempt to find the flaws in the alien’s claim,” Arthur wrote.

Even if the DHS official denies a migrant’s request, the Mayorkas rule preserves all the other options for the migrants, including work permits while their asylum pleas are considered, reconsidered, and reconsidered again, during years of delayed and backlogged appeals caused by President Barack Obama’s 2009 decision to let huge numbers of asylum-seeking migrants get U.S. jobs before their courtroom decision.  “The alien could get an adjudication and four layers of review after entering illegally under the proposed rule,” Arthur wrote.

The Mayorkas rule also rewrites regulations to end the detention of nearly all migrants who merely say they are afraid of returning home. This means DHS officials could pressure officials to quickly release new migrants into U.S. jobs on the claim that detention is “unavailable or impracticable.” The current backlog of migrants with court cases is roughly 1.3 million, so allowing government officials to claim the detention problem they created in 2009 is unfixable in 2021.

The rule flatly ignores the federal law that protects working Americans by requiring the detention of job-seeking migrants, said Arthur:

Congress has mandated that aliens in expedited removal be detained, but because DHS can’t stop the current surge of illegal migration at the Southwest border, it plans on tossing that requirement out the window. All aliens must do to be released is claim credible fear, and they will almost all be set free.

Unsurprisingly, Immigration lawyers are delighted by the giveaway from Mayorkas, a Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot who has said DHS officials must keep “foremost” the “dignity” of migrants — not of American unemployed, poor, sidelined, or addicted.

“The Biden administration’s new rule represents a fundamental retooling of the asylum system,” said an article by a long-standing pro-migration advocate, Doris Meissner, at the Migration Policy Institute. “It promises a fundamental shift aimed at ensuring … safe, legal, and orderly migration,” she wrote.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a “policy council” at the American Immigration Council, touted the rule in a series of tweets:

Under this proposal, once someone is found to have a credible fear, they will get an “asylum hearing” at USCIS that will operate on a separate track from USCIS’s standard “affirmative asylum” system. If they win at that hearing, congratulations, they’ve been granted asylum! … Importantly, these new appeal-of-asylum-officer-denial court proceedings would not be full removal proceedings. They’d be some form of limited “asylum-only” proceedings. However, if the person is eligible for other relief, the judge can switch to full removal proceedings … Finally, if a person loses at the immigration court review process following an asylum denial, they will still have full access to a standard appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals and the federal circuit courts … In short, these new proceedings seem intended to operate largely as a filter for the easily winnable cases, lifting them away from the immigration courts and sending them to a hopefully shorter process run by USCIS. But more complicated cases will still get full court cases.

Reichlin-Melnick’s council is a spin-off of the Association of Immigration Lawyers of America, whose members are hired by foreigners to help them get shares of Americans’ citizenship.

The federal policy of extraction migration pulls many workers, consumers, and renters from poor countries for use in the U.S. economy. The economic policy inflates the labor supply and boosts consumer spending, so aiding companies and investors. Except for 2019 and 2020, the policy has been underway for decades, even as the government underfunded its partial defense of the border.

Migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their open-minded, equality-promoting civic culture.