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February 25, 2021

Dear John,

The Biden administration has taken swift steps to reverse several high-profile Trump-era restrictions on asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. However, rebuilding the asylum system will take sustained and strategic action, including by addressing longstanding weaknesses in the asylum adjudication system, Migration Policy Institute (MPI) Senior Fellow Doris Meissner and Policy Analyst Sarah Pierce argue in a new commentary.

Read it here: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/biden-administration-asylum-road-ahead.

Recent actions including the decision to end the Migration Protection Protocols that have required asylum applicants to await decisions in northern Mexico mark important first steps to restore efficient and fair asylum procedures at the border.

The Biden administration faces other decisions, including:

• Revisiting the grounds for asylum eligibility and the narrowed interpretations of protection established by Trump attorneys general.
• Authorizing U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officers to decide the full merits of border asylum cases, which would help reduce record backlogs in the immigration court system, make border management more effective, and result in more timely, fair adjudications.
• Initiatives to scale up legal representation for asylum seekers in their proceedings.

"The challenge now is to fix the plane while flying it," the authors write. "That calls for creating a new reality of deciding asylum cases fairly but promptly and forestalling a humanitarian emergency at the border that could eclipse the administration's plans for buttressing border control through both a more effective, humane asylum system and strong, proactive efforts to reduce the drivers of migration through regional migration management measures with neighboring countries."

Best regards,

Michelle Mittelstadt
Director of Communications and Public Affairs,
Migration Policy Institute
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