Paxton Sues Biden Admin Over New Asylum Regulations

AG Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration Thursday over new regulations handed down on asylum applications. From BorderReport.com,

The Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, in a joint statement Thursday, said new rules will allow authorized asylum officers from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to screen migrant applicants who are subject to expedited removal from the United States. Those who assert a fear of prosecution or torture and pass a credible-fear screening will be allowed to remain.

It’s important to note a few things: First, from the KXAN report,

The new rule “transfers significant authority from immigration judges to asylum officers, grants those asylum officers significant additional authority, limits immigration-judge review to denials of applications, and upends the entire adjudicatory system to the benefit of aliens,” according to the 21-page lawsuit.

Asylum officers are famously known for their rubber stamping of asylum requests due to the way the incentive structure works for their workload. (More on this coming soon.) Immigration judges, who trend as stricter and more rigorous, have been prevented from actively taking part in the process. Instead, the new streamlined version of the process puts the majority of the cases in the hands of asylum officers knowing that the overwhelmed review courts will not be able to keep up.

If they were serious about fixing not just this backlog but the other immigration backlogs, they'd add immigration judges and ICE attorneys. But, that isn’t the goal of the refugee industrial complex.