Asylum processing suspended as travel restrictions increase Migrant management strategies are a tool, not a solution

photo by Leslie Layton
Migrants in crowded shelters on the Mexican side of the border who are pursuing asylum in the United States may be stuck there indefinitely.

by Lucy Hood
The United States has implemented travel restrictions on an unprecedented scale in recent weeks that immigration experts say are riddled with loopholes and devised in a way that puts vulnerable populations at risk.

This is especially true at the U.S.-Mexican border, they said, where tens of thousands of migrants living in shelters in northern Mexico now have a very slim, if any, chance of pursuing their asylum cases in U.S. immigration courts.

The Trump Administration recently closed the border to nonessential traffic, and in the process invoked a little-known health code to effectively bring asylum petitions to a standstill, said Alex Aleinikoff, director of the Zolbert Institute on Migration and Mobility and a former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. read more