Your Comment Needed: Trump’s Asylum Ban Endangers Lives

By on January 4, 2019

Early last November, the Trump administration issued a rule and proclamation that would effectively ban thousands of people from seeking asylum in the United States – in plain violation of domestic and international law. UUSC immediately condemned the rule as an illegal and immoral assault on migrants.

This new low in immigration policy makes everyone who crosses the southern U.S. border outside official ports ineligible for asylum and forces them to apply for a different status – “withholding of removal” – that is harder to obtain and includes far fewer protections.

These new barriers to safety not only put people at risk of being returned to the very dangers they have fled, but they also contradict the words of U.S. asylum law, which state, “Any alien… who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival… irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum[.]”

For these reasons and others, U.S. courts have already wisely blocked this rule from going into effect—a decision UUSC welcomed. The rule is currently merely halted under a temporary injunction, however, and could go into effect at a later stage of the litigation. We, unfortunately, saw this playout last year with Trump’s notorious “Muslim Ban.”

UUSC submitted our organizational comment today, and we hope you will join us to help build the record against this unjust rule and assist the ongoing effort to defeat it permanently.  We have until Tuesday, January 8 and midnight ET to raise our voices in opposition and we need as many individualized comments as we can.

Read and download UUSC’s comment.

Image credit: Unsplash – Lucas Franco