If Congress repealed the Refugee Act of 1980 would the fight over migrants between the Trump administration and the court system end?
The court system has been obstructing the Trump administration’s attempts to deport various classes of undocumented migrants who are here in the U.S. One might imagine that making a deportation decision would be a simple process. A migrant who lacks either a visa or a green card is ineligible for U.S. residence and, therefore, he/she/ze/they can be deported. Because, however, any migrant is entitled to make an asylum claim, e.g., as Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia did in 2019 (eight years after illegally entering the U.S.). At that point, some folks reasonably argue that “due process” requires U.S. government workers to determine whether the tale told by the asylum-seeker is true (see Federal government weighs in on a 15-year-old pupusa dispute (Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia)). It’s unclear why anyone thinks truth determination is possible. Only one side of the story is available, i.e., from the migrant who stands to gain four generations of a work-optional lifestyle (entitlement to public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone). It’s an absurd farce in which the winners are those with the best acting skills, but it’s guaranteed to be an expensive farce with hundreds or thousands of hours invested by lawyers on all sides (government, migrant, judges) for each migrant whose status is determined. Other than high fees, the one thing all of these lawyers will have in common: none will have any clue about what actually happened on the other side of the world 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
(Another farcical element is that nothing stops a Salvadoran from claiming that El Salvador, 20X safer than Baltimore or Washington, D.C., is too dangerous and that therefore he needs to live right here in the country where most of the most violent Salvadorans now reside.)
How did we get to the point that every migrant who strolls across the border can impose a $1 million cost in legal fees on the U.S. taxpayer? Professor of Constitutional Law Dr. ChatGPT, JD, PhD explains that we can thank the noblest of all U.S. Presidents, Jimmy Carter:
The premise of the asylum framework seems to be that Earth is generally too dangerous to be occupied by humans with the exception of the United States, which is the only safe place. World population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion people and 4.4 billion in 1980. Today, despite the fact that almost every country is officially deemed too dangerous to inhabit, the human population is somewhere between 8 and 10 billion (nobody knows).
Republicans have control of Congress right now. Instead of these constant fights with the courts regarding whether anyone can be deported, wouldn’t it make more sense for Trump to ask Congress to repeal the Refugee Act of 1980 and pass a new law that says “The United States does not offer temporary or permanent residence on the basis of an asylum claim and, in fact, does not offer asylum. It is a shame that various countries at various times have problems, but Americans hope that people who live in those countries will cooperate to work out their problems.” Asylum-seekers wouldn’t be disadvantaged by such a change because anyone who wants to seek asylum can do so in Canada, Mexico, the UK, Germany, etc.
Loosely related… (source)
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