Asylum-seekers and kids in court are Trump’s next deportation target

On Tuesday, the Trump administration introduced a new rule that diverts people who are applying for asylum straight to deportation court. The new rule, which is being billed as an “efficiency” and went into effect immediately, is an attempt to multiply deportations by plucking people who applied for asylum out of an administrative line and dumping them into mass deportation hearings without time to prepare their cases. 

The U.S. humanitarian protection system is not just collapsing. It is being systematically attacked from within by an administration that is willing to send people to be tortured in a foreign prison, detain children on a toxic former military base and end their legal representation and deport Iranian women to war zones while sharing their confidential case information on activists with the Iranian government. 

But faced with the evidence that this administration is prepared to send people to their deaths, many politicians and commentators continue to push for policies that severely limit humanitarian protection. This is, at best, tone deaf in our current moment.  

A new report from my organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, explains that rules limiting access to asylum by capping how many people can apply and where, or making the standard harder are expedient and arbitrary policies that do not update the asylum system or border processing. They are merely proposals to limit the number of people who can lawfully seek access to protection.

And right now, advancing restrictionist proposals — despite evidence of their past failure, and at a time when the Trump administration is attacking all lawful immigration — is not........

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