In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) instituted a policy of capping the number of asylum seekers that it would process at southwest ports of entry in direct violation of the law, which states that officers “shall refer” aliens arriving in the United States “for an interview by an asylum officer.” In December 2018, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen defended this “metering” policy and told Rep. Zoe Lofgren in sworn testimony that the agency lacked the “capacity” to follow the law or even to increase at all the processing of people who arrive “without papers.”
In response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, we now know this was an indefensible statement. DHS both had more agents than ever at the southwest border and had double the detention capacity than it was using in December 2018. It simply chose to ignore the law. The true purpose behind “metering” was to stop people from making asylum claims legally at the ports—as one DHS official admitted at the time—and force them into Border Patrol’s family separation machine.
This is how it played out: DHS set the caps on asylum at ports so low that families were stranded in squalid and dangerous conditions in Mexico. Facing destitution, homelessness, and crime, asylum seeking families crossed illegally around the ports in order to apply for asylum as the law allows. Border Patrol arrested those families and, from April to June 2018, separated the children from their parents in order to refer the parents for criminal prosecution for crossing illegally.
Nielsen never explained what she meant by the ports lacking processing “capacity,” but FOIA responses from Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations (CBP-OFO), the DHS component that handles admissions at ports of entry, show that it had more agents at its field offices along the southwest border than in 2016 when the agency processed more immigrants.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/officials-misled-congress-ignore-asylum-law-set-family-separations
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