Trump Admin Weighs Plan To Reject Asylum Applications Without Interviewing Applicants Amid Massive Backlog

(MENAFN- Live Mint) US President Donald Trump's administration seems to be intensifying its crackdown on immigrants in the country. The administration is reportedly framing a plan that would allow immigration officials to quickly reject some asylum applications without even interviewing the applicants.

CBS News reported the development on Monday (local time), citing internal federal documents. The regulation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mentioned in the internal documents would be the latest effort by the administration to restrict access to the country's asylum system, which officials have claimed is marred by systematic fraud.

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Under the new regulations, officers at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS ), a unit of DHS, will be allowed to reject asylum applications without following the traditional practice of interviewing the applicants if they find that the cases were filed a year after the applicants arrived in the country.

According to the documents, the agency would then place rejected applicants in deportation proceedings before the Department of Justice (DOJ )'s immigration court system, requiring them to plead their cases to remain in the country in an adversarial setting.

The proposed regulation, detailed in internal documents, would enable USCIS officers to continue processing an asylum application and schedule an interview if they determine that the applicant qualifies for an exception to the one-year filing deadline.

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However, it would also mark a significant departure from the agency's long-established practice of interviewing nearly all asylum seekers before ruling on their claims, enabling officials to swiftly deny applications when available records indicate the applicants failed to meet the one-year filing requirement.

What does US immigration law state?

The report suggests that, in general, immigration law disqualifies foreigners from seeking asylum if they do so a year after entering the country. However, that provision includes exceptions, such as cases involving a serious medical condition or poor legal counsel. Unaccompanied minors are also not subject to the deadline.

US law also allows most foreigners on American soil to request asylum, despite entering the country illegally. However, obtaining asylum itself requires meeting a far higher standard, with applicants needing to demonstrate that they are escaping persecution based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Individuals granted asylum can remain in the US permanently, while those whose claims are rejected are generally subject to deportation.

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A USCIS spokesperson told CBS News in a statement that the administration is "considering multiple options" to address a backlog of over a million asylum claims "created by the Biden administration's dangerous open borders policies," including sending "deficient" applications to the immigration courts.

"This would allow USCIS to avoid wasting time on asylum applications that it would otherwise refer to immigration proceedings and will allow illegal aliens to have their claims heard by a judge," the USCIS spokesperson added.

Massive backlog in asylum cases

In the last few years, a backlog of millions of asylum cases has hampered the federal government's ability to adjudicate applications quickly, a backlog that both Republican and Democratic administrations have said encourages economic migrants to use the system to stay and work in the US, despite not qualifying for asylum.

USCIS, which oversees asylum cases filed by immigrants in the country legally or who are not facing deportation, had 1.5 million pending asylum applications as of last fall, government figures show. Meanwhile, DOJ's immigration courts, which handle deportation cases, had 3.3 million pending claims as of March, 2.3 million of them involving asylum requests.

As part of its deportation crackdown, the Trump administration has adopted several measures to restrict asylum and aggressively pursue the deportation of asylum seekers, mainly those who were allowed into the US along the southern border under the Biden administration.

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