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Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued an immigration ruling Monday that will make it much harder for victims of domestic violence and gang violence to get asylum. The new ruling is likely to affect mostly Central Americans, who have been seeking asylum in recent years.
His big new asylum ruling is extremely bad news for parents separated from their children at the border, too.
Tens of thousands of people who are currently waiting for their asylum cases in the US to be resolved — or waiting for their chance to apply — just got the door all but slammed on them.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a ruling Monday in an immigration case, Matter of A- B-, that will make it hard or even impossible for Central Americans fleeing gang violence in their home countries, and women fleeing domestic violence, to get asylum in the US — or even be allowed to stay in the US to seek asylum instead of being summarily deported.
“Generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by non-governmental actors will not qualify for asylum,” Sessions declared. Immigration judges and asylum officers need to tighten the standards of qualifying for asylum — or even being allowed to stay to present a case — accordingly.
Sessions referred the case to himself from the Board of Immigration Appeals, the quasi-appellate body of immigration courts run out of the Department of Justice, which means Sessions’s word is now law.
The ruling doesn’t flat-out say that an immigrant can’t be granted asylum on the basis of having faced domestic violence or gang violence in her home country. But it makes it clear that, to the federal government, suffering either of those things — or having a credible fear that you might suffer them if returned — isn’t enough to count as persecution and allow you to stay in the United States.
Sessions is using his traditional, but rarely used, powers of self-referral to reshape the way that immigration courts work. The new ruling will have an immediate impact on tens of thousands of cases currently in the pipeline.
It could even trap some of the families separated in the last few weeks by the Trump administration’s new “zero-tolerance” border policy — depriving the parents of any way to stay in the country, and drastically reducing their chances of relocating their children before they’re deported.
This is about the difference between the common-sense idea of asylum and the legal definition of the term
Because the fundamental principle of asylum is safety — that people endangered by persecution in their home countries should be able to find safety in the countries to which they flee — it might seem like common sense that victims of violence in other countries ought to qualify for asylum in the US, to protect them from danger.
But in both US and international law, persecution doesn’t just mean danger. It means danger based on one of five specific characteristics: race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a “particular social group.” An asylum seeker who is definitely in danger, but for some other reason, is technically out of luck.
”Particular social group” is the only characteristic that doesn’t have an obvious definition. So a lot of US asylum law has been dedicated to figuring out what, exactly, counts as a particular social group — and how to define it so that it encompasses groups who are persecuted in similar ways to religious or ethnic minorities, without being so broad that it makes “persecution” refer to any personal vendetta an immigrant might be leaving behind.
For several years, courts — not only immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals, but also federal circuit courts — have been trying to hash out where victims of gang violence fit into this schema. Some Central American teenagers have claimed they qualify for asylum because any teenage boy not in a gang is likely to be targeted by one — or that they’re women of a certain age likely to be targeted by gangs for sexual violence.
And because there’s been disagreement between courts about when that counts as a basis for an asylum claim, people who arrive in the US and ask for asylum because they have a specific reason to worry they’re targeted by gangs tend to pass their initial interviews and be allowed to stay in the US to prove their claim.
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