A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected on April 24 the government’s denial of the right to seek asylum for asylum seekers who arrive at the southern border. The ruling stops summary deportations based on President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day proclamation of an “invasion” at the US-Mexico border.
The court held that US immigration law “makes plain that the right to apply for asylum is broadly available to all foreign individuals present or arriving in the United States unless expressly restricted from applying.”
Last year, I traveled to Panama and Costa Rica to meet scores of asylum seekers from a Who’s Who of refugee-producing countries, including Russia, Iran, China, Afghanistan, and Cameroon. All arrived after Trump’s inauguration with the intent of seeking asylum; all were flatly denied that opportunity and were instead detained incommunicado, cuffed and chained, loaded onto planes, and dumped into countries with which they had no connections whatsoever.
None of the people I interviewed, including those who gave harrowing accounts of persecution in their home countries, had the opportunity to apply for asylum. To implement Trump’s proclamation, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued guidance saying that individuals “who cross between the ports of entry on the southern land border” are “not permitted to apply for asylum.”
And that’s exactly what happened.
“I asked for asylum repeatedly… Nobody listened to me,” Mina, a 27-year-old Iranian woman who had converted to Christianity, told Human Rights Watch. “I didn’t understand why they didn’t listen to me. Then an immigration officer told me President Trump had ended asylum, so they were going to deport us.”
The court has now ordered the DHS to stop deporting people like Mina, although the courts have so far not ruled that Mina and others like her who were denied access to the asylum process and wrongfully deported should be allowed to come back to apply for asylum.
But going forward, the court’s message to DHS officials is clear: US immigration law “does not allow the President to remove Plaintiffs under summary removal procedures of his own making. Nor does it allow the Executive to suspend Plaintiffs’ right to apply for asylum.”
