WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House is finalizing plans for a U.S.-Mexico border checkpoint that would halt asylum applications and automatically deny entry to migrants once the number of people U.S. border officials encountered exceeded a new daily threshold. Joe Biden They are expected to sign an executive order as early as Tuesday, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The president has been considering additional executive actions since the collapse of a bipartisan border bill earlier this year. The number of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border has been declining for months, thanks in part to Mexico’s stepped-up efforts. Still, immigration remains one of the biggest concerns ahead of the US presidential election in November, and Republicans are keen to press Biden on the issue.
The Democratic administration’s efforts would be aimed at preventing a potential spike in crossings that could occur later in the year, as the fall elections approach, when the weather cools and numbers tend to rise, two of the people. They were not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing discussions and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The move would allow Biden, whose administration has taken smaller steps in recent weeks to discourage migration and speed up the asylum process, to say he has done all he can to control border numbers without help from Congress.
Discussions were still flowing and people emphasized that no final decisions had been made yet.
The restrictions being considered are an aggressive effort to ease the country’s overwhelmed asylum system, along with a new effort to expedite the cases of migrants already in America, and another effort to speed up the processing of migrants with a criminal record or those who would otherwise ultimately be considered ineligible for asylum in the United States.
The people told the AP that the administration was weighing some policies directly based on a stalled bipartisan border deal in the Senate, including limiting the number of encounters to an average of 4,000 per day for a week and whether that limit would also apply to asylum seekers who come abroad. the border with appointments via the CBP One app of the US Customs and Border Protection. There are currently approximately 1,450 such appointments per day.
Two of the people said one option is that migrants who arrive after the border reaches a certain threshold could be automatically removed in a process similar to deportation, and would not be able to easily return. Migrants could more easily return to the border if they were expelled under the pandemic policy known as Title 42. Under that arrangement, Mexico agreed to take back some non-Mexican nationalities, including migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
Migrants, especially families, who seek asylum at the southern border are generally released to the U.S. to await their cases. But there are more than two million immigration lawsuits pending, and some people wait years for a trial while living in limbo in the US.
Anyone can seek asylum regardless of whether they arrive at the border illegally, but U.S. officials are increasingly urging migrants to make appointments, use a legal route that avoids the costly and dangerous journey, or stay where they are and register through outposts in Colombia. Guatemala and Costa Rica.
The Biden administration has become increasingly conservative on border issues as the president faces relentless criticism from Republicans and large numbers of migrants entering the U.S. from Mexico cannot easily return, especially as global displacement increases due to war, climate change and more. .
The immigration authority the government intends to use is set forth in Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It gives a president broad leeway to block the entry of certain immigrants into the U.S. if doing so would be “detrimental” to the U.S. national interest.
Senate Republicans last week again blocked a bill that would have codified some of the same efforts into law. The vote was aimed at underscoring the GOP’s opposition to the proposal, even as Republicans have called for more restrictions and argued that Biden has not done enough to stem the flow of migrants entering the US.
The bipartisan bill was negotiated for months and, at least for a moment, it seemed to be coming together. It was even endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council and its president Brandon Judd, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. But Trump, concerned about handing Democrats an election-year victory, called on Republicans to undermine it, and they did.
White House officials have not confirmed the expected executive order.
White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández said the administration “continues to explore a range of policy options and we remain committed to taking action to address our broken immigration system.”
“While Republicans in Congress chose to stand in the way of additional border enforcement, President Biden will not stop fighting to deliver the resources border and immigration personnel need to secure our border,” he said.
Congress this year approved funding for a total of 41,500 detention beds and increased money for immigration enforcement and removal operations by $1.2 billion above what the White House initially requested. That included $106 million in additional funding for programs that monitor immigrants in the asylum system through phone apps and ankle bracelets, rather than through detention.
These increases, negotiated after the collapse of the bipartisan agreement, could pave the way for the administration to ramp up immigration enforcement.
But unlike legislative actions, which are binding, anything Biden does through executive action can, and almost certainly will, be challenged in court. So it is not clear when – or if – the suppression of asylum would begin. The government also considered other measures, including faster and stricter enforcement of the asylum procedure.
The government has generally combined proposed crackdowns with an expansion of legal options elsewhere and planned to do so in the future, but not at the same time the new restrictions were announced, the people said.
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Associated Press writer Stephen Groves contributed to this report.
