At Southern Border, Malign Neglect for "Crisis"

      The so-called crisis at the United States' southern border is a challenging policy issue that President Trump has exaggerated for political purposes and that his administration has mishandled through legal mistakes and administrative indifference.
      In this, the most lawless presidency in U.S. history, news of another Trump administration policy initiative ruled illegal by a federal judge provokes nothing more than a "dog-bites-man" reaction. The administration's plan to send border-crossing asylum applicants back to Mexico was ruled late last month [March 27] to run afoul of immigration law and to have been adopted without following proper administrative procedure.
      Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security, the umbrella Cabinet-level department responsible for immigration and other important national security issues, has an acting secretary after Trump eased Kierstjen Nielsen out of the post. Nielsen resigned this week [April 7] under duress, according to anonymous friends quoted in various news accounts, after drawing Trump's scorn for nixing some of his tough-talking policy ideas as contrary to law.
      Trump has been whipping up hysteria about the growing number of migrants seeking asylum at the southern border ever since the months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections. In demagogic rhetoric, Trump tried with only limited success to whip up his political base by depicting the refugees fleeing violence and disorder in their Central American homelands as would-be invaders.
      Admittedly, the growing number of refugees at the border pose difficult challenges for an immigration system overburdened along the 2,000-mile long southern border and also in U.S. immigration courts. With 424 judges, immigration courts currently have a backlog of 850,000 cases. Asylum cases contribute to that backlog, but they account for fewer than one-third of the total, according to a report published last fall by the pro-immigration Migration Policy Institute.
      The institute's 35-page report, coauthored by Doris Meissner, the Clinton administration's commissioner of what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), sought to cut through the political divisions on the issue by proposing a package of administrative steps to reduce the now customary long wait times in resolving asylum cases. The key to the streamlining package is to get more cases decided administratively within the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) asylum division without bucking them to the courts.
      The report notes that the backlog of asylum cases was reduced from more than 400,000 in the mid-1990s to fewer than 100,000 from 2005 through 2014, thanks in part to a doubling of the number of asylum officers within USCIS. The system had been "fair, timely, and well managed," the report concludes, until it fell behind as the number of asylum applicants increased fivefold from 28,000 in 2010 to more than 140,000 in 2017.
      The customary delays of anywhere from two to five years create what the report calls "incentives for individuals without qualifying claims to apply" because they can remain within the United States and perhaps obtain work authorizations while their cases are pending. In the meantime, individuals with qualifying claims for asylum wait in the queue. The results, the report concludes, "compromise both humanitarian protection and immigration enforcement missions."
      Francis Cissna, the Trump administration's USCIS director, spoke favorably about the institute's report at a program it cosponsored in November at Georgetown Law School. But Sharon Pierce, a policy analyst who works with Meissner at the institute, says they have heard nothing concrete from the administration since then.
      "The Trump administration is not interested in solving the problem," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, remarked on MSNBC on Friday [April 12]. "They're much more interested in the politics of it."
      The administration is focused not on making the system work better but making it tougher. Thus, Attorney General Jeff Sessions instituted a major policy change during his tenure at the Justice Department by eliminating domestic or gang violence as grounds for asylum. As a result, the percentage of asylum applications approved has fallen by more than half from close to 50 percent to less than 25 percent.
      Nielsen announced another policy change in December. The so-called Migrant Protection Protocols provided that asylum applicants apprehended after illegal entry would be returned to Mexico instead of being detained for expedited removal proceedings. Nielsen called it "an historic action to confront illegal immigration," but U.S. District Court Judge Richard Seeborg called it illegal in a 27-page ruling  issued early this week [April 8].
      Individual plaintiffs in the case, originally styled as Innovation Law Lab v. Nielsen, presented what Seeborg called "uncontested" evidence that they fled their homes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua to escape "extreme violence," including rape and death threats. He found that returning them to Mexico ran counter to an international protocol codified as U.S. law that prohibits returning aliens to "places where they face undue risk to their lives or freedom."
      As with the unbuilt border wall, Trump prefers sounding tough to being effective. He threatened to close the southern border completely, deterred not by Nielsen's warning that the move would be illegal but by predictions that it would result in economic chaos. Among other steps to address the problem, one would be to conduct asylum interviews in the migrants' home countries instead of at the border. Increased aid to those countries might help, but Trump instead threatens to cut it off.
     To make it worse, the administration's "zero tolerance" policy of arresting all illegal border crossers results in a true humanitarian crisis marked by kids locked up in cages and aduilts jailed in primitve conditions.So far, the administration's policy of malign neglect appears to be having no effect other than making the non-crisis worse.