Local Immigration Advocates Grapple With New Federal Asylum Ruling

On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions ruled that fears of domestic and gang violence are not enough to grant asylum seekers lawful entry into the U.S.  According to Sessions, in the case of domestic violence, because a non-government actor is harming an individual applying for asylum, the U.S. government does not have a duty to protect that person.

“The prototypical refugee flees her home country because the government has persecuted her,” Mr. Sessions wrote in his ruling. He added, “An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons relating to her social, economic, family or other personal circumstances. Yet the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.”

The impact on local immigration lawyers was swift. Elon University Law Professor Heather Scavone says that same language could apply to a wide range of circumstances: people fleeing persecution from homophobia, ethnic violence carried out by private citizens or the risk of female genital mutilation.

Scavone chairs the North Carolina State Refugee Office's Immigration Committee, and is Director of Elon's Humanitarian Immigration Law Clinic. 

“For example, here in North Carolina, we have a lot of Eastern Congolese individuals who are members of the Tutsi ethnic minority,” says Scavone. “In many cases, it's not the direct government of Congo that's persecuting them, but there are informal militias who promote ethnic violence against Tutsis.”

In the recent ruling, the Attorney General addressed the Trump Administration's assertion that violent gang members are manipulating U.S. immigration policies, flooding the country illegally. But data does not support those concerns. Since 2014, the success rate of Central Americans seeking asylum from gang violence has been low, with entry being granted mostly to those who argued their cases on multiple grounds.

Last year, the number of illegal immigrants who were apprehended at the border was the lowest since 1971. In 2016, the number of asylum seekers granted permanent entry into the U.S. was less than one in ten.

Scavone sees this latest ruling as part of a coordinated effort to further destabilize governmental agencies set up to assist refugees in the U.S. The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) provides money to states including state governments to fund private nonprofits that help with refugee resettlement. Scavone says under the current administration's “zero tolerance” border policy, when the government moves in to separate immigrant children from their parents, those children must go into ORR custody.

“As a result, increasing the number of children who go into federal custody will put heavy demands on the budget of the ORR,” says Scavone. “That budget also covers refugee related social services. And so, by drastically increasing the number of children that go into our custody, that will decrease the amount of money available to serve existing refugees that are being served by ORR pass-through money.”

Meanwhile, zero-tolerance proponents argue that the number of immigrants allowed legally in the U.S. has been cut from 110,000 during the Obama Administration's peak, down to 45,000 today. They hold that the lower immigration numbers should allow the ORR budget to meet its new child custody demands. Not so, says Scavone.

“Because the refugee ceiling was drastically cut down to only 45,000 for this year, there was a budget cut to ORR for this fiscal year as well,” she says. “The cut was approximately $169 million dollars with the idea being that because there are less anticipated refugee arrivals they will need less money to operate. Now, that's kind of disingenuous because that money doesn't just go to help people who arrived in one given fiscal year. It's intended to help people for five years. At the same time [that] we're losing an enormous amount of funding, the number of unaccompanied alien children who are going to go into our custody [is] increasing drastically. So, we can anticipate that there's going to be a double adverse effect of less money to take care of existing refugees, and not enough money to take care of these children who are in our custody.”