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Advocates Cheer DOJ Reversal of Trump Policy Denying Asylum to Victims of Violence
"Now it's time to build on this progress," said one migrant rights campaigner. "We're ready to work with the administration to create an asylum system that provides every person a fair opportunity to apply for protection."
Jun 16, 2021
Immigrant rights advocates hailed the Wednesday reversal by U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland of a Trump-era rule denying asylum in the United States to victims of domestic or gang violence as a "critically important" step toward restoring the right of refuge to migrants fleeing countries where their lives are often in danger.
"This was the right move. We are thrilled for our client and for the many deserving individuals fleeing persecution who will have a fair chance to seek refuge in the United States."
--Karen Musalo, CGRS
In a pair of decisions, Garland vacated a 2018 guidance from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that declared migrants would no longer automatically qualify for asylum if they presented concerns of domestic abuse or gang violence in their home countries.
Later that year, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. struck down much of the contentious Justice Department guidance, calling it "arbitrary, capricious," and unlawful.
According to the New York Times, Wednesday's decision involves the cases of two asylum-seeking Salvadoran women known as A-B- and L-E-A-. In 2016 and 2017, the Justice Department's Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that the women qualified for asylum since the government of El Salvador did not adequately protect people suffering domestic abuse.
A 2020 Human Rights Watch investigation found that at least 138 people deported from the United States to El Salvador since 2013 were killed, and that at least 70 others were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, or tortured. Many of the victims were murdered or harmed by the gangs they originally fled.
However, Sessions overruled the board's decision regarding A-B; his successor, William Barr, responded similarly to the board's finding in L-E-A-'s case.
\u201c\u201cAttorney General Merrick B. Garland on Wednesday reversed a Trump-era immigration ruling that made it all but impossible for people to seek asylum in the United States over credible fears of domestic abuse or gang violence.\u201d\n\nThis is critically important. https://t.co/s771mU7g3q\u201d— The Leadership Conference (@The Leadership Conference) 1623881019
"These decisions involve important questions about the meaning of our nation's asylum laws, which reflect America's commitment to providing refuge to some of the world's most vulnerable people," Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta wrote on Wednesday in a memo to the Justice Department's Civil Division.
Migrant advocates hailed news of the DOJ policy reversal.
"This was the right move. We are thrilled for our client and for the many deserving individuals fleeing persecution who will have a fair chance to seek refuge in the United States," Karen Musalo, director of the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) and co-counsel in Matter of A-B-, said in a statement.
"Now it's time to build on this progress," she added. "We're ready to work with the administration to create an asylum system that provides every person a fair opportunity to apply for protection, in line with our human rights obligations."
\u201cThis is an important move in the right direction.\n\nToday\u2019s announcement will help undo some of the damage caused by the Trump administration\u2019s attacks on asylum.\u201d— ACLU (@ACLU) 1623881363
Bradley Jenkins, federal litigation attorney at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC) and one of the lawyers representing L-E-A-, said that "families facing persecution qualify for asylum under any reasonable interpretation of the law, and it is encouraging to see Attorney General Garland take this step toward restoring the asylum system."
"We hope that the rule-making process will result in further progress toward a fair and humane asylum policy," he added.
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DOJ Rescinds Trump-Era Policy Denying Grant Money to Sanctuary Cities
The move targeted a May 2017 directive requiring recipients of a $250 million law enforcement grant pool to cooperate with immigration authorities.
Apr 28, 2021
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month rescinded a Trump administration policy that denied hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants to law enforcement agencies in sanctuary jurisdictions, Reutersrevealed Wednesday.
The news agency viewed an internal Justice Department memo sent by Maureen Henneberg, acting head of the Office of Justice Programs, revoking a May 2017 directive from then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions that limited $250 million in federal funding for law enforcement to states, counties, and municipalities that cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Henneberg's memo instructs DOJ employees to "pull down and revise all solicitations that describe requirements or priority consideration elements or criteria pertaining to immigration."
The memo also orders DOJ staff to rescind any pending grant applications conditioned upon cooperation with ICE. "These solicitations will be reposted and grantees will be required to reapply," she wrote.
\u201cDOJ confirms Reuters exclusive that Biden has revoked an order limiting so-called sanctuary cities from millions in grants for refusing to cooperate with ICE. @Law360\u201d— Sarah Betancourt (@Sarah Betancourt) 1619623241
Garland ordered department officials to implement the new policy on April 14, according to Reuters. The move followed President Joe Biden's signing of an executive order overturning one of Trump's first directives, an order aimed at pressuring jurisdictions into cracking down on undocumented immigration.
The DOJ's Community-Oriented Policing website states that "grant-making components issued revised guidance on April 22, 2021 regarding conditions on certain department grants," and that consistent with Biden's executive order and Garland's April 14 directive, "DOJ informed grant recipients and applicants that they will continue receiving certain department grants."
Numerous states and cities sued the DOJ over the grant prohibition policy. Last February, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of the Trump administration, setting up a potential U.S. Supreme Court showdown that was averted by Biden's election. Last month, the DOJ urged the Supreme Court to dismiss pending sanctuary city cases.
Former President Donald Trump's "zero tolerance" immigration policies targeting undocumented migrants and refugees and the communities that offered them sanctuary coincided with a broader campaign against progressive cities that included designating New York, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon "anarchist jurisdictions."
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'Damning' New IG Report, Says ACLU, Shows Just How Far Trump Team 'Was Willing to Go to Destroy' Immigrant Families
"Just when you think the Trump administration can't sink any lower, it does."
Jan 13, 2021
As a former leading U.S. Justice Department official on Thursday said he regretted the role he played in the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" migrant family separation policy in the wake of a scathing inspector general report, human and civil rights groups pointed to the probe's findings as "damning" proof of the administration's cruelty toward people seeking refuge in the United States.
"The incoming administration must reunite the separated families in the United States, but we cannot stop there. These families deserve citizenship, resources, care, and a commitment that family separation will never happen again."
--Lee Gelernt, ACLU
The inspector general's report (pdf) concluded that President Donald Trump, ex-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and other senior officials were woefully unprepared when U.S. agents started seizing thousands of migrant children from their asylum-seeking parents and relatives who were often imprisoned in concentration camps after entering the United States, first in a 2017 DOJ pilot program and then nationwide the following year.
The report, based on interviews with dozens of DOJ officials and a review of over 200,000 emails and other electronic files, directly implicates Trump in the disastrous policy. It also found that senior administration officials were "fully aware" that the policy would result in children being separated from their families but pressed ahead with it anyway.
\u201cThe cruelty is the point. \n\nThis administration\u2019s unconscionable family separation policy will forever be a stain on our nation\u2019s history.\n\nhttps://t.co/9dscvdoxC4\u201d— Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (@Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley) 1610651249
In response to the report, former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Thusday released a statement of regret.
"Since leaving the department, I have often asked myself what we should have done differently, and no issue has dominated my thinking more than the zero tolerance immigration policy," Rosenstein toldNBC News. "It was a failed policy that never should have been proposed or implemented. I wish we all had done better."
The ACLU--which successfully sued to block family separation and immediately reunite families--led human and civil rights groups in reacting to what it called the "damning" report.
"The barbaric family separation practice was immoral and illegal," said Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer who led the family separation suit, in a statement on Thursday. "This new report shows just how far the Trump administration was willing to go to destroy these families. Just when you think the Trump administration can't sink any lower, it does."
\u201cThe more we learn about family separation, the more we see was both a willfully cruel and criminally negligent policy.\n\nWe must hold every person who created and facilitated family separation accountable under the law and never repeat this mistake. https://t.co/eIWf8S986j\u201d— Juli\u00e1n Castro (@Juli\u00e1n Castro) 1610647584
\u201cA reminder that those quitting on Trump now are the same people who stood by him as he cruelly separated families and caged kids.\n\nWe must do everything we can to reunite families, hold all those who caused this torture accountable, and humanely reform our immigration system.\u201d— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@Rep. Pramila Jayapal) 1610665156
The new DOJ report's findings correspond with those of a 21-month House Judiciary Committee investigation published last October that accused the Trump administration of "reckless incompetence and intentional cruelty" in its implementation of the zero tolerance policy. In November, Conmon Dreams reported that 666 children--about 20% of whom were under the age of 5 when they were ripped away from their parents--remained separated from their families.
As a result of the separation policy, both parents and children--who were often told by U.S. officials that they would never see each other again--have suffered tremendous emotional and psychological trauma that Physicians for Human Rights has called "torture" and "state-sanctioned child abuse."
Some of the seized children have been placed in U.S. families, who are sometimes able to petition for permanent custody, and it is feared that some of the children may indeed never see their parents again.
In late June 2018, as public outrage mounted in the face of stories like a breastfeeding baby being torn away from her mother and a father driven to suicide after being separated from his wife and child, the administration reluctantly rolled back the policy--which, along with forced surgical removal of reproductive organs of migrant women has been called the Trump administration's worst domestic human rights violation.
During the 2020 election, President-elect Joe Biden vowed to form a task force to reunite all of the separated children with their relatives. Gelernt stressed that he must now follow through on his promise.
"The Biden-Harris administration will inherit the legacy of family separation, and we don't doubt that more horrific details will continue to emerge," the ACLU attorney said. "We need them to act with urgency--every day without action makes it harder to find and reunite families."
"The incoming administration must reunite the separated families in the United States, but we cannot stop there," Gelernt added. "These families deserve citizenship, resources, care, and a commitment that family separation will never happen again."
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