A United Nations agency expressed “profound concern” on Monday over the Biden administration’s updated asylum restrictions along the U.S-Mexico border.
President Joe Biden on Monday updated an executive order that will help keep in place asylum restrictions and control the number of unlawful crossings at the southern border. However, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) condemned the move in a public statement and called on the White House to reconsider.
“UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, restates its profound concern as the U.S. government moves to make permanent its June 2024 asylum regulation,” Matthew Reynolds, UNHCR Representative to the U.S. and the Caribbean, stated. “The regulation severely curtails access to protection for people fleeing conflict, persecution, and violence, putting many refugees and asylum seekers in grave danger without a viable option for seeking safety.”
“Every person seeking asylum must be granted access to safety and afforded the opportunity to have their claims individually and fairly assessed before deportation or removal,” Reynolds continued. “Limiting or blocking such access is a violation of international refugee law and the humanitarian principles to which the United States has long been a leader.”
Biden in June issued a presidential proclamation that aimed to control the number of daily unlawful border crossings by suspending the entry of foreign nationals across the U.S.-Mexico border after the number of average border encounters exceeded 2,500 a day over a week time period.
The executive order was meant to stay in effect until two weeks after there had been a seven-day average of fewer than 1,500 encounters along the southern border. However, the order has proven incredibly effective at controlling the border crisis, and the administration is aiming to keep the controls in place as the presidential election nears.
Biden on Monday tweaked the threshold at which the partial asylum ban would be deactivated, making it more difficult for federal officials to do away with the order. Under the changes, the threshold for deactivating the asylum restrictions would only happen after the seven-day average remains below 1,500 for 28 days.
Despite the suggestion in the UNHCR’s statement, a vast number of illegal migrants encountered by Border Patrol agents are not from countries that are experiencing conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals appear between ports of entry along the southern border annually — along with similar encounters by Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran and other nationals from stable countries, according to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in May acknowledged in a media interview that there are migrants who are out to “game” the asylum system.
“The reality is that some people do indeed try to game the system,” Mayorkas admitted to CBS News at the time. “That does not speak to everyone whom we encounter, but there is an element of it, and we deal with it accordingly.”
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