Rights group vows to fight Attorney General Barr’s decision that expands indefinite detention for many asylum seekers.
Detained asylum seekers in the United States who have shown they have a credible fear of returning to their country will no longer be able to ask a judge to grant them release using bond, according to a ruling by US Attorney General William Barr, who overturned decades-old policy on
Tuesday.
Barr struck down a decision that had allowed some asylum seekers to ask for bond in front of an immigration judge, in a ruling that expands indefinite detention for some migrants who must wait months or years for their cases to be heard.
The first immigration court ruling from President Donald Trump’s newly appointed attorney general is in keeping with the administration’s moves to clamp down on the asylum process as tens of thousands of mostly Central Americans cross into the United States asking for refuge. US
immigration courts are overseen by the Justice Department and the attorney general can rule in cases to set a legal precedent.
Barr’s ruling is the latest instance of the Trump administration taking a hard line on immigration. This year the administration implemented a policy to return some asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases work their way through backlogged courts, a policy which has
been challenged with a lawsuit.
Several top officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were forced out this month over Trump’s frustrations with an influx of migrants and asylum seekers at the US southern border.
Barr’s decision applies to migrants who crossed between official ports of entry into the US.
Typically, those migrants are placed in “expedited removal” proceedings – a faster form of deportation reserved for people who irregularly entered the country within the last two weeks and are detained within 100 miles (160km) of a land border. Migrants who present themselves at ports of
entry and ask for asylum are not eligible for bond. But before Barr’s ruling, those who had crossed the border between official entry points and asked for asylum were eligible for bond, once they had proven to asylum officers they had a credible fear of persecution.
“I conclude that such aliens remain ineligible for bond, whether they are arriving at the border or are apprehended in the United States,” Barr wrote.
Barr said such people can be held in immigration detention until their cases conclude, or if DHS decides to release them by granting them “parole”. DHS has the discretion to parole people who are not eligible for bond and frequently does so due to insufficient detention space or other
humanitarian reasons.
The decision doesn’t affect asylum-seeking families because they generally can’t be held for longer than 20 days. It also doesn’t apply to unaccompanied minors.
Barr said he was delaying the effective date by 90 days “so that DHS may conduct the necessary operational planning for additional detention and parole decisions”.
