If you think it’s unfair for would-be concertgoers to have to go through services like Ticketmaster, you might be shocked to learn that the Biden administration has issued a rule to force would-be asylum-seekers who transited through more than one country without being rejected for asylum there first to use the government’s own glitchy app to reserve slots to apply for asylum.
A similar rule issued by the Trump administration in 2019 did not survive court scrutiny, having been enjoined and then vacated by separate district courts. President Joe Biden’s contention that his policy is substantively different because it’s not a prohibition but a rebuttable presumption of ineligibility is basically only parsable by lawyers and makes little difference on the ground.
The rule, which is currently in a notice and comment period through March 27, is likely to get struck down by the courts, just like its predecessor. More broadly, the attempt to simply switch one type of heavy-handed asylum restriction for another is a detestable capitulation to the Trump approach of managing humanitarian migration by doing whatever possible to end most of it, despite Biden’s early and frequent assurances that his presidency would be a clean break from his predecessor.
