Biden Unveils New Immigration Rules to Streamline Asylum Cases
One third of all new cases in U.S. immigration courts are children under the age of 18, and of those cases, 40 percent are toddlers under the age of 4.
Landwebs
The Biden administration has unveiled new procedures to handle asylum claims at the U.S. southern border, empowering asylum officers to grant or deny claims, where before they had only done initial screenings for asylum and other forms of humanitarian relief for border arrivals, in an effort to decide cases in months instead of years, reports the Associated Press. The administration estimated last year that it would need to hire 800 more employees for asylum officers to handle about 75,000 cases a year.
The current court backlog has soared to nearly 1.7 million cases, with asylum claims for people who are not detained taking an average of nearly four years to decide. Under the new rules, asylum officers expect to decide cases in 90 days. Rejected applicants will be sent to immigration judges, who also expect to issue decisions in 90 days. The changes come as, according to Boundless.com, a new report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan and nonprofit data gathering organization, has found that one third of all new cases in U.S. immigration courts are children under the age of 18, and of those cases, 40 percent are toddlers under the age of 4.
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