A team of NPR journalists set out to determine if it’s actually as easy to cross the southern border as Republicans have been warning for three years. The answer, evidently, is yes.
In March, the NPR team walked south through a port of entry connecting Nogales, Arizona, to Mexico, encountering a migrant shelter within a hundred yards of the southern border. At the shelter, the NPR team met a Venezuelan family that traveled through seven countries by the time they “won the lottery” in the form of an interview with Customs and Border Protection. While U.S. law only allows asylum for applicants who fear being persecuted in their home country “on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion,” Carla, Jose, and their two children did not appear to qualify.
“In Venezuela it’s difficult for us to find food and well-being, especially for the kids,” a fellow traveler said of her family and Carla and Jose’s. “We have to be allied with the government. If you’re not aligned with one of them, you don’t get certain benefits.”
Notice that economic suffering does not constitute grounds for asylum, and the legal definition of “persecution,” which must come from a government or entity the government willfully allows to run rampant, is primarily reserved to a material threat to the life or liberty of an asylum applicant on the basis of the above protected classes. Even the Biden administration has only considered economic harm grounds to constitute persecution when a government deliberately impoverishes an applicant, such as burning down an applicant’s house or seizing all of one’s assets while banning him or her from employment.
“Severe economic harm must be harm ‘above and beyond [the economic difficulties] generally shared by others in the country of origin and involve more than the mere loss of social advantages or physical comforts,'” an officer training manual distributed by the Biden Department of Homeland Security reads.
The NPR team agreed to meet up with Carla and company if they were granted entry at their appointment the next day.
“As we approached the Nogales port of entry, officers with U.S. Customs and Border Protection asked us if we were U.S. citizens,” the NPR team reported after it strolled on back to the Mexican side of the border. “When we said we were, they waved us through without asking to see identification.”
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The very next day, despite not qualifying for asylum under any definition of the term under either U.S. or international law, Carla, Jose, and their children were admitted with a future court date of Nov. 18, 2027. That’s 3 1/2 years, or 1,298 days, from now.
The causes of the crisis at the southern border have remained the same since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Beyond his moronic decision to rip up the Remain in Mexico and Safe Third Country diplomatic deals that reduced the international flow of human traffickers and drug cartels swarming the southern border, his administration and asylum courts are simply refusing to enforce the law as written. That doesn’t require a single new law. It requires a new president to restaff the system from scratch.