US says crush on asylum system justifies new restriction

Bloomberg

The US government said an overwhelming crush by immigrants crossing the southern border justifies a new rule restricting asylum applications from Central Americans who haven’t sought protection from persecution or torture in another country through which they passed.
The Justice Department filed its response to a request by immigrant rights’ groups for an emergency court order to halt enforcement of the rule.
It urged the judge to reject the group’s request. A hearing on the request is scheduled on Wednesday San Francisco federal court.
According to the government’s filing, more than 500,000 immigrants who aren’t Mexican have been apprehended at the southern border in first eight months of its 2019 fiscal year. That’s more than double the number of the past two years combined, the US said.
Many of them will claim fear of persecution but never apply for asylum once they are released in the US, don’t show up for their asylum hearing or have their claim denied, the govenrment said.
The rationale for the rule is “the need to dis-incentivise aliens with meritless asylum claims from seeking admission to the United States, thereby relieving stress on immigration enforcement and adjudicatory authorities, prioritising individuals who are unable to obtain protection from persecution elsewhere,” the government said.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups this week sued to block the rule, calling it the Trump administration’s most extreme run at an asylum ban yet and alleging it violated both domestic and international law.
Congress gave power to the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to decide who may be admitted into the country as a refugee, the government said.
They invoked that authority to establish additional limitations under which immigrants are ineligible for asylum because the system is being overwhelmed at the southern border.
There are 900,000 cases pending before immigration judges, almost half of which contain an asylum application, according to the government.
“The rule aims to save lives by discouraging asylum seekers from making dangerous, unlawful border crossings, while promoting asylum’s core purpose of providing refuge to desperate refugees who reach our shores with nowhere else to turn,” the US said.