Opinion
America Is Turning Away People Fleeing for Their Lives — and Breaking the Law to Do It.
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By Michael Posner
As seen in: Just Security
For generations, the United States has offered protection to people fleeing persecution, including people who arrive at our ports of entry seeking asylum. While most of those who have sought asylum did not meet the high legal standards necessary to establish eligibility, those who claim a fear of return have always had the opportunity to be heard. The Trump administration wants to take that opportunity away.
We are among a bipartisan group of 13 former U.S. government officials – some political appointees, others career civil servants – who have spent many years inside the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, State, Justice and the Immigration and Naturalization Service — interviewing asylum seekers, shaping refugee and human rights policy, and implementing the laws that govern whom America protects and whom it turns away. We know this system from the inside. And we are writing now because the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to approve something never before sanctioned in U.S. law: the categorical exclusion, without so much as a hearing, of people who have made it to our door seeking asylum.
The case, Noem v. Al Otro Lado, which will be heard by the Supreme Court on March 24, involves the administration’s “turnback” policy — physically blocking asylum seekers from entering a port of entry, then arguing they have no right even to apply for asylum because they haven’t technically crossed the border. That argument is not just morally troubling; it is legally wrong — and the evidence shows it produces exactly the kind of chaos and harm it claims to prevent.
Read the full Just Security article.
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Michael Posner is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance, Professor of Business and Society and Director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.