Act now to protect asylum-seekers!
Asylum has been suspended at the U.S. Border due to Biden’s Asylum Bans. Remind the Biden Administration that seeking asylum is a human right and to end his cruel border shutdown.
WHY ARE PEOPLE LEAVING THEIR COUNTRIES?
People are fleeing their homes trying to find safety.
Over 120 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide. This includes internally displaced people, refugees, asylum seekers, and people in need of international protection. There are tens of millions more migrants – people who are on the move and have left their countries and crossed borders to seek a better life.
Some might be fleeing because of violence, war, extreme poverty, persecution due to their race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity, or the consequences of the climate crisis. Or they might believe they have a better chance of finding work and stability in another country or they want to reunite with family, study, or pursue their dreams.
People on the move include more than 43 million refugees worldwide who have fled their countries because they are at risk of serious human rights violations and persecution there. They have been recognized as refugees legally and have a right to international protection.
More than 6.9 million asylum-seekers have left their countries and seek protection from persecution and serious human rights violations but haven’t yet been legally recognized as refugees. There are also 5.8 million people in need of other types of international protection who are displaced around the world. The United States has codified the right to seek asylum into U.S. law, assuring that people have a right to seek safety in the U.S. regardless of their manner of entry.
to enter another country
to seek asylum
Millions of people are migrants who are staying outside their country of origin but don’t fit the legal definition of asylum seekers or refugees. Some migrants leave their country because they want to work, study or join family. Others feel they must leave because of poverty, political unrest, gang violence, natural disasters or other serious circumstances.
Even if they are not fleeing persecution, everyone is entitled to have all their human rights protected and respected.
WHY IS IT AN ISSUE?
Many people feel overwhelmed by the numbers, have seen lots of new arrivals in their communities and schools, hear political rhetoric demonizing people seeking safety, and see people moving across borders as a global crisis.
This is not a crisis of numbers or security – the people are not the problem. Rather, the causes that drive families and individuals to cross borders, such as human rights violations, cruel deterrence policies that create humanitarian emergencies, and the ways that politicians respond to them, are the problem.
In the United States, decades of outdated and cruel immigration policies have caused irreparable harm to refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants. Congressional inaction and a reliance on cruel deterrence, enforcement, and detention policies have resulted in violations of both U.S. and international human rights and refugee law and resulted in a broken system plagued by backlogs, abuse, and human suffering.
These policies and practices implemented in the last decade include among others:
- Mass unlawful expulsions of asylum seekers at the U.S.- Mexico border back to the very danger they fled or into extraordinary danger in Mexico
- Externalization policies that force people to wait in danger in Mexico for months at a time.
- Bans on the opportunity to seek asylum
- Family separations that have ripped children away from their families at the border, and every day in communities across the U.S. when family members are swept up in raids or targeted for immigration enforcement,
Increasingly arbitrary and indefinite detention of asylum seekers and vulnerable community members in a massive detention system plagued by physical, sexual, and medical abuse, anti-Black racism, and an ever-increasing death count.
Inadequate and racist immigration policies
Refugees remain in backlogs while waiting in dangerous refugee camps, and tent cities continue to grow across Mexico where asylum seekers wait for months in extraordinary danger for the chance to seek safety.
Immigrants and people seeking asylum often face grave harm, including abuse and death, in immigration detention facilities, where conditions are well-documented to have substandard medical care, cruel conditions, inadequate basic hygiene, overcrowding, unchecked abuse, and widespread use of solitary confinement.
People have the human right under U.S. and international law to seek asylum without discrimination of any kind.
Racist refugee and immigration policies have caused catastrophic, irreparable harm to millions of people, spurning and violating both national and international laws and human rights obligations. These policies are aimed at dismantling the asylum and resettlement systems, punishing people from seeking safety, upending communities with mass deportations, and protecting white supremacy.
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
The United States border policies are not working – for anyone.
Communities across the United States are struggling to make ends meet, while they see billions of their taxpayer dollars fuel policies at the border that have created heartbreaking humanitarian crises and chaos in communities across the country, from small towns to big cities. Brave, resilient families and individuals are arriving at the U.S. southern border to exercise their right to seek safety and seek a new life where they follow their dreams and contribute to their new communities only to be thrust into a broken system that prolongs and profits off their suffering.
The United States is abandoning decades-old international obligations to uphold the human right to seek asylum and not send people back to the very harms that they fled.
AIUSA has developed a Human Rights Blueprint for the Border, a better way to guard the safety and dignity of all our communities:
The demonization of immigrants and people seeking safety has only resulted in the cruel, racist policies that fuel the chaos at the border and communities across the United States. Borderland communities are safe, vibrant, and have solutions to the issues facing their communities beyond immigration and asylum, like access to healthcare, reproductive justice, housing, quality education, and more.
People must have access to seek asylum regardless of how they enter the country, period. Modernizing and investing in capacity at ports of entry allows people to walk up in a safe, orderly manner and be processed expeditiously, and stops funneling people to cross via dangerous routes at the hands of criminal actors.
A functioning immigration court and USCIS that are properly funded and staffed, where people have lawyers to help them in the process, not only helps with the strain at the border but would benefit the entire immigration system and the families, communities, and industries that rely on it functioning.
A coordinated and funded welcome and reception system that meets the immediate and long-term needs of people seeking safety would cut the chaos and dysfunction at the border and in big cities in the US, while meeting the needs of state, local and tribal communities who can reap the windfall benefits of new federal funding avenues, spending power of new arrivals, and new tax revenue.
People seek safety at the border because they don’t have another way to safety. Expanding humanitarian pathways like innovative humanitarian parole programs and the US Refugee Admissions Program and strengthening and developing protection mechanisms ensures that people can seek safety in a safe, orderly fashion.