JFON El Paso Denounces the Asylum Ban
JFON El Paso Denounces the Asylum Ban
We are halfway through March, and JFON El Paso is still accepting applications for two positions of Staff Attorney and Executive Director through this month, so please reach out if you or someone you know may be interested in applying. Job descriptions can be found here.
Over this past month, we saw several setbacks in the path to restore asylum. Biden Administrative officials in February proposed a new rule that would effectively eliminate the possibility of asylum for the vast majority of migrants seeking entry to the United States. The 30-day comment period that the government provided is still running, so be sure to submit your comment here. Our border communities will further suffer disproportionate levels of chaos from not having actual legal avenues in place.
A New York Times article in early March also suggested that government officials are contemplating a return to family detention, a practice whose harms are well documented.
And March 21 will mark three years since the implementation of Title 42, a measure that was supposed to be "temporary".
It is easy to be pessimistic or fatalistic about the direction these policies are headed, but we don't have the luxury of inaction when we are dealing with people's actual lives. It is all the more important that each of us advocates for the importance of asylum, for the benefits of immigration, and for the importance of being consistent with the values our country espouses. We must educate ourselves and others, demanding political solutions. The New Way Forward Act is one such attempt, and will be reintroduced on March 29, 2023 to the 118th Congress.
The New Way Forward Act would:
· End mandatory immigration detention
· Restore judicial discretion and limit summary deportations
· Limit the criminal legal system to deportation pipeline
· End entanglement between federal immigration law enforcement and local law enforcement
· Provide an opportunity to come home for people previously deported
· Decriminalize migration by repealing criminal prosecution for “illegal” entry and re-entry
Deterrence and punitive measures fundamentally don't work, as they ignore the structural forces that fuel migration. We need to nurture our imaginations and recommit to our country being a last place of refuge.
Vanessa Johnson, Interim Executive Director