A young asylum seeker is carried by his mother after crossing the nearby border with Mexico near the Jacumba Hot Springs on Nov. 30, 2023, in San Diego, Calif. (Qian Weizhong / VCG via Getty Images) |
BY MARY GIOVAGNOLI | The Senate is feverishly debating the president’s $106 billion supplemental budget, which includes requests for additional aid to Ukraine and Israel, measures to counter China’s influence, significant humanitarian assistance funds, and border security. The debate is not turning on how much or whether to provide different aspects of the aid, though. Instead, it’s focused on whether the country is willing to trade access to asylum for foreign aid objectives.
What’s behind this strange development? Because the supplemental includes additional funding to support border security, including increasing the number of asylum officers and immigration judges handling asylum claims, Republican negotiators have chosen to use the urgency of the foreign aid requests to squeeze concessions from the administration and Democratic senators around the asylum process itself.
This dangerous strategy threatens to upend our asylum system and to further limit the president’s authority to take life-saving actions to provide humanitarian assistance. As Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) noted on the Senate floor, Republicans want permanent concessions on asylum policy in exchange for one-time agreements to provide foreign aid.
It’s a disproportionate bargain—particularly when the details are disclosed. News reports indicate that Republicans want to change the threshold screening standard for determining whether an asylum seeker at the border will be allowed to apply for asylum from showing a credible fear of persecution to a reasonable fear of persecution. They also want to curtail the president’s parole authority and to deny asylum access to anyone who didn’t first apply for asylum in any country they traveled through to get to the U.S.
Each of these demands are detrimental to our ability to provide humanitarian protection to people who need it—such as Afghans fleeing the Taliban, women fleeing domestic violence in Central America, or Venezuelan and Ukrainians eligible to enter the U.S. through targeted parole programs.
The issues are so complex, in fact, that they have no business being part of a debate over levels of funding for foreign aid. (Click here to read more) |
