Reporter's Deep Dive Finds A Broken Immigration System

Speaker 1: 00:00 We heard KQ ETS report on Luna Guzman, a transgender woman who has tried to escape persecution and violence in her native Guatemala by seeking asylum in the U S Luna's journey has a spanned a number of years and several attempts to claim asylum, but she's still a long way from achieving her dream of living in America. This year at the San Diego union Tribune produced a multi-part series of in-depth reports on the us asylum system. The series is called returned and joining me is San Diego union Tribune, immigration reporter, Kate Marcy, Kate, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having no, for all practical purposes. Does the us have a working asylum system in place right now? Speaker 2: 00:45 Well, we don't really have, um, people entering into it, uh, fresh right now. So if somebody comes to the border today and with, with the intention of seeking protection, um, most likely they're going to be turned back under, um, this pandemic policy through, through an order issued by the CDC that, um, you know, basically says anybody who's, who's a migrant seeking asylum. We're not going to let them into the country during the pandemic. So they either get returned back to the country that they were most recently in. So most likely Mexico, um, or in some cases put on planes back to their home countries. It's, it's sort of a mix. Speaker 1: 01:28 The situation, uh, has gotten a lot worse for asylum seekers in the last four years. What are some of the changes that Trump administration has made? Speaker 2: 01:36 The first changes that we really saw came through, um, the attorney general and the department of justice because immigration court, unlike most courts that we think about in the United States is actually in the executive branch of government. And the attorney general is the boss of the judges. So the attorney general has these special powers to, um, sort of re decide, uh, precedent and case law and immigration. And, uh, we've seen the attorney general do that over and over again, and sort of restrict definitions and, and cut out groups of people who might otherwise have been considered as qualifying for asylum. Um, and then we saw, you know, the remain in Mexico program, which has been a huge change for asylum seekers experiences when they're, when they're coming to the United States. Um, it requires people to, to stay in Mexico while they wait for their cases to, to happen in immigration court, they cross back and forth to go to their hearings, but they are on their own trying to find, you know, places to live food, to eat, figuring out how to sustain themselves and stay safe in, in border cities, in Mexico, where migrants are, are notoriously targeted for, for all kinds of harm. Speaker 2: 02:45 So, and then we've seen, you know, restriction after restriction since then trying to sort of every kind of tweak imaginable to make fewer people eligible for the system, or even have access to the system. And even just in the couple of weeks, we've seen more rule changes coming out of the administration. So that's, that's still an ongoing thing. Speaker 1: 03:05 Now, could the new Biden administration reverse those changes and make the asylum system workable. Again, Speaker 2: 03:11 The Biden administration could work to, to undo what the Trump administration has done, um, that will take time and, and a lot of figuring out of how to go about it. Uh, you know, the Trump administration has had four years to put these different measures in place, and there are rules about how to go about undoing different kinds of regulations. So it's not something that can happen overnight. You know, even if we return to what we had before the Trump administration, that system was not itself terribly functional. As, as we've shown in, in my reporting over the past year, the system has been full of disparities and bias for years. Um, and people have been, you know, returned to their deaths who arguably were the kind of people that the system was created to protect. Speaker 1: 04:00 Do you think Kate, that there's a fundamental issue here that many Americans no longer support the idea of taking in refugees from around the world? In other words, does the broken system actually reflect our changing attitude toward helping refugees? Speaker 2: 04:18 Well, I think one of the things that, um, really stuck out to me as I looked back at the, the history of this system and the history of the American public's perception of the system is that by and large, the American public has never been super enthusiastic. We initially were in talks with other countries, right after world war II to create something like this. We didn't sign on to those international agreements until the mid sixties. And we didn't actually pass laws that created the system until 1980. And so you see over the course of, of us history, a lot of feet dragging and, and pretty immediate xenophobic or, or other sort of anti-immigrant anti asylum seeker rhetoric coming out, even, you know, even in the night. Speaker 1: 05:02 So what's the case in favor of this. Why should America continue to accept people who are being persecuted in their homelands? Speaker 2: 05:11 When you think about, about why the system was created, when you look at, you know, what happened during the Holocaust, or when you look at sort of these, these widespread issues of forced displacement around the world, it's a global problem when people are not safe when they don't have the basic idea of security to live in when their lives are in danger, they're going to try to live somewhere else rather than having, you know, an orderly and efficient way to get people, you know, resettled and, and, and living their lives. It, it creates a lot of still being in danger, Speaker 1: 05:50 Your most recent report focused on how we could, re-imagine the U S asylum system. What are some of key points of that new vision? Speaker 2: 05:59 One of the big ones is moving the immigration court to the judicial branch. And so, you know, everyone from the immigration judges union to the federal bar association are all pushing for this and have been pushing for it for a long time. Um, there's also possibilities of creating a system that looks more like the Canadian system. So if, if somebody comes to the United States, uh, with a student visa and says, Hey, you know, it's not safe for me to go back to my country after they've been here. Um, they don't go through the immigration court process right away. They actually just go to the asylum office. They do an interview with an asylum officer and that asylum officer can grant them asylum. So it's not adversarial in the way that you think of a court where you have a very well-trained attorney arguing against your ability to get protection. Um, and so Canada has a system that looks more like that. Um, they also provide, you know, legal help, legal support to asylum seekers going through that process. And then, uh, another one would be ending, uh, detention for asylum seekers, which would actually, um, save, you know, us taxpayers, quite a bit of money. Speaker 1: 07:09 I've been speaking with San Diego union Tribune, reporter Kate Morrissey, her multi-part series on the us asylum system is called returned. And Kate, thank you. Thank you.