If there was any doubt about Attorney General William Barr’s loyalty and commitment to President Trump’s harsh immigration policies, Barr erased it by issuing a single new order overnight.
It states that migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. can be detained indefinitely — even after they establish legitimate fear of persecution and violence in their home countries.
“It means that thousands of asylum seekers who once would have been out on bond and living in the U.S. while awaiting a decision on their status will now be kept in detention centers, where the wait times are climbing from months to a year,” reports NBC News.
The order, to take effect in 90 days, also directs immigration judges to deny some migrants a chance to post bail.
“We are talking about people who are fleeing for their lives, seeking safety. And our response is just lock them up,” Judy Rabinovitz, a deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times.
“This is the first time that Barr has used his position as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer to overrule precedent-setting decisions made in immigration court,” says the Washington Post. “His ruling reverses a decision made in 2005 … [and] the clear intent is to deter people from trying to seek asylum, no matter how credible their claims.”
The order is certain to be challenged in federal court.
In a statement, Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Project, denounced Barr’s order as “the Trump administration’s latest assault on people fleeing persecution and seeking refuge in the United States.
“Our Constitution does not allow the government to lock up asylum seekers without basic due process,” he added, “We’ll see the administration in court.”
In a tweet, Richard Painter, a former White House ethics attorney in the George W. Bush administration, called the new order “ridiculous.”
And Evan McMullin, a former House Republican staff member, CIA officer and independent 2016 presidential candidate, said Trump has turned the U.S. into “a callous, brutish nation.”
The timing of Barr’s immigration order also raised some eyebrows. It comes one day before the attorney general is due to release his redacted version of the Mueller Report on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. That is all but certain to dominate the news on Thursday, pushing the immigration issue out of the news spotlight.
Several critics of the order suggested that it may be unenforceable by already overburdened Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
“This ruling gives [ICE] the legal authority to detain all of these people indefinitely,” Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration think tank, told CNN. “That’s if they have the capacity. So I think the actual effect of this ruling will be severely limited by ICE’s capacity.”
