Today U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) published an interim final rule, effective immediately, that permits the agency to send asylum cases directly to immigration court, without first having an asylum officer interview the applicant. The Center for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) strongly denounces this rule, which marks yet another move by the Trump administration to accelerate deportations of people seeking safety.
“The Trump administration’s new rule will undermine due process in cases with life-or-death stakes,“ said Kate Jastram, CGRS Director of Policy and Advocacy. “Since taking office, the administration has turned our immigration courts into a deportation machine. Now it seeks to funnel more asylum applicants into that machine. The consequences are predictable: More people will be wrongly deported to countries where they face grave risks of persecution or torture. This rule takes effect on the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Refugee Convention, a watershed moment when world leaders came together and promised to never again return refugees to danger. With the publication of its new asylum rule, the Trump administration cements its utter disdain for this promise.”
For decades, people seeking asylum in the United States who are not in deportation proceedings have had their legal claims assessed in a non-adversarial interview with USCIS. This practice has streamlined the asylum process, ensuring that each claim is evaluated fully and fairly by a trained asylum officer.
Under the new rule, those applicants may instead be sent directly to immigration court. With many applicants navigating the asylum process without an attorney, this will force vulnerable people, including children and families, to go to court alone, and face a government attorney arguing for their deportation. This shift will also exacerbate the significant immigration court backlog.
Even more alarming, under the Trump administration immigration judges have been empowered to deny applications for asylum without holding a hearing, a practice known as pretermission. Sending asylum applications directly to the courts will result in more cases being pretermitted, and more people being denied the chance to tell their story and make their case to a human being. The administration’s clear intent is to deport as many people as possible as quickly as possible, regardless of the dangers they face or the due process to which they are entitled.