Immigration

Biden Reportedly Planning To Make Tightened Border Asylum Restrictions More Permanent

(DHS photo by Tia Dufour)

The Biden administration is reportedly preparing to make more permanent an executive order that clamped down on asylum claims at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The White House will soon issue changes to an existing executive order making it much harder for asylum restrictions to be lifted, according to two sources who spoke with CBS News. The executive order that President Joe Biden issued over the summer resulted in a dramatic decline in illegal crossings along the southern border.

Amid a peak in illegal border crossings and a lagging presidential campaign, Biden in June issued a presidential proclamation that aimed to control the number of daily illegal border crossings.

Biden’s order temporarily suspended the entry of foreign nationals across the U.S.-Mexico border after the number of average border encounters exceeded 2,500 a day over a week time period, according to the administration’s announcement. The order was meant to stay in effect until two weeks after there has been a seven-day average of fewer than 1,500 encounters along the southern border.

The order — which largely draws its authority under 212(f) and 215(a) from the Immigration and Nationality Act — made it easier for Border Patrol agents and other Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials to quickly remove foreign nationals who have no legal basis to remain in the country.

Illegal border encounters have dropped nearly every month since that order went into effect, according to the latest CBP data. The result has brought some relief to an administration that has overseen a massive wave of illegal immigration into the country since entering office.

The White House is now reportedly looking to tweak the threshold at which the partial asylum ban would be deactivated, making it much harder for federal officials to do away with the order, according to CBS News. Under the reported changes to come, the threshold for deactivating the asylum restrictions would only happen after the seven-day average remains below 1,500 for 28 days.

“July and August saw the lowest encounter levels since September 2020,” White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández told CBS News. “The Biden-Harris Administration has taken effective action, while Republican officials continue showing that they are more interested in cynically playing politics than securing the border.”

While illegal border crossings have declined in recent months, critics have stated that the White House has simply disguised the issue by creating programs allowing foreign nationals to legally enter country en masse.

The administration recently boasted about the executive order leading to a more than 50% reduction in border encounters between ports of entry, but that same announcement also noted that more than half a million foreign nationals have been flown into the country via a mass parole program, and nearly a million others have scheduled appointments with the U.S. government in hopes of entering.

Nearly 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans have been flown into the country and granted parole under an initiative launched by the Biden-Harris administration known as the CHNV program, according to the CBP press release. Additionally, around 813,000 migrants have scheduled appointments to present at ports of entry via the CBP One app since its introduction in January 2023.

“These schemes only serve to hide the crisis in plain sight and increase the number of inadmissible aliens who are released into our communities with insufficient vetting and screening,” House Homeland Committee Chairman Mark Green said earlier this month.

The congressman had previously referred to both initiatives as a “massive shell game” that allows otherwise inadmissible aliens to enter the country lawfully in lieu of crossing the border illegally.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.