A claim of support of human rights without a permanent relief for asylum seekers is just a sham.
The demonization of asylum seekers and refugees by the Trump administration and Trump supporters is well documented. Asylum and refugee processing practically came to a halt in the final eighteen months of the Trump administration.
PHOTO/ PixPoetry (Unsplash)
What differentiates the Trump administration from previous administrations in the post-World War II era is its treatment of asylum seekers everywhere, regardless of their motive or place of origin. All asylum seekers are presumed to be criminal immigration violators trying to scam the system. Moreover, for the first time since the asylum seekers aboard the M.S. St. Louis were turned away from our shores, the United States government no longer held back contempt for the tired, poor masses fleeing persecution.
This startlingly apathetic treatment of refugees comes at a time when the backlog for Affirmative Asylum Applications has reached historically high levels. According to the DHS, 194,000 people were awaiting their initial asylum interview in September 2016. By January 2018, the number was 311,000, and it grew to over 327,000 by March 2019.
The latest DHS report shows that by the fourth quarter of 2020, more than 386,000 asylum seekers are stuck in the asylum backlog. As a result, many asylum seekers endure prolonged family separation, economic deprivation, and the anxiety that ICE will force them to return to the country where they will face persecution, torture, and death.
Ironically, despite the Trump administration’s relentless attacks against asylum seekers as invaders and freeloaders, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued to lash out at authoritarian regimes in support of the oppressed population fleeing from those countries. Specifically, Pompeo singled out China, Venezuela, and Cuba, for violating the basic human rights of their citizens.
In September of 2020, Pompeo visited a migrant reception center in Brazil to investigate the plight of Venezuelan refugees. In an interview with the press, Pompeo blamed Maduro for a “man-made crisis” of unprecedented proportions while publicly referring to the Venezuelan leader as a “drug-trafficker.”
In the same month, Pompeo voiced his “deep concern” about twelve Hong Kong democracy activists being held in China, saying that they have been denied access to lawyers and Hong Kong authorities are withholding information about the criminal prosecution.
Photo by Joseph Chan on Unsplash
Immediately before leaving office in February of 2021, Pompeo designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Pompeo cited a litany of crimes Cuba had committed that formed the basis for the designation. Mr. Pompeo claims that the action will send a message that “the Castro regime must end its support for international terrorism and subversion of U.S. justice.”
Lastly, in the final twenty-four-hour of his stint as U.S. Secretary of State, Pompeo declared that the Chinese government is committing “ongoing genocide” against the Uighur minority population in Xinjiang autonomous region.
While these harsh words may be mistaken for someone who actually supports human rights, the Trump administration has, in fact, done little to protect the asylum seekers fleeing totalitarian states whose applications have lingered for years on end. To make matters worse, the Trump administration enacted new rules in August of 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, to make it exceedingly difficult for asylum seekers to obtain employment authorization to legally support themselves, as a way to “strengthen and discourage abuse of the immigration system.” In reality, depriving asylum seekers of work authorization for more than one year will only force desperate applicants to engage in unlawful employment, making them easy prey to employers who are happy to take advantage of their predicament.
Under Secretary Anthony Blinken, the incoming Biden team generally agrees with Pompeo on most human rights issues. In the State Department’s annual global Human Rights Report, released on March 31, 2021, the Department of State blasted China and Russia for human rights violations against ethnic minorities and political dissidents.
Nonetheless, despite these big words, the U.S. government has done nothing to address the problem of asylum delays, which directly affect the plight of the people seeking refuge from the human rights violations addressed in Blinken’s annual reports. The delay of asylum processing has wreaked havoc on the mental health of many asylum seekers, especially for applicants whose family members are locked up in reeducation camps. A peer-reviewed research article, published in the medical journal PLOS Medicine on September 21, 2020, documenting the prevalence of mental illness in refugees and asylum seekers showed that 31.45% were diagnosed with PTSD (1,376/4,639); 31.51% had depression (1,066/3,877); 11.09% suffered from anxiety disorders (305/2,840) and 1.51% were diagnosed with a psychotic illness (31/1,695).
While no known studies have directly linked the prevalence of mental illness to the delays in asylum processing, there is no doubt that the uncertainty of immigration status caused by the government’s refusal to act is a significant stress factor for the asylum applicant. The failure of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations to address the asylum processing delay problem has had a catastrophic effect on individual applicants. In the past twelve months, I have witnessed three asylum clients suffering mental breakdowns, one attempting to commit suicide, another suffering a series of psychotic episodes, and a third who returned to his home country after being blackmailed by government officials from the country of persecution. The reality is, none of the U.S. administrations have taken concrete steps to safeguard the mental wellness of asylum seekers.
The Trumpian policy of criminalizing asylum seekers is in line with America’s historical pattern of systemic racism and anti-immigrant populism. To restore public trust in human rights and the rule of law, the Biden administration can start by following a long-standing federal law, which requires the government to conduct an interview within 45 days after the date an application is filed. Most people would agree that a claim of support of human rights without protecting the individual fleeing from persecution is nothing but a sham. The continued refusal by the government to process asylum adjudications lends credence to the claim by America’s adversaries that the United States government frequently denies due process to migrants, and the delay invariably exacerbates the stress level of having to flee from persecution and torture. The real humanitarian crisis today is how asylum seekers are being abandoned by the public institutions that purport to help them.
